Government says negotiations with SPLM/A “impossible”

Sudanese government Information Minister Mahdi Ibrahim has accused rebel leader John Garang of making negotiations to end the country’s 18-year civil war impossible, AFP reported on Monday. “Garang is a lunatic. He changes the agenda, he has opposed all [Sudanese] governments and all initiatives,” it quoted Ibrahim as saying in Cairo, after a meeting between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Uthman Isma’il on Monday. The Sudanese minister said Garang’s rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) had “imposed four conditions of the kind that make it impossible to sit down at the negotiating table with them”, the report added.

The SPLM/A is refusing talks with the government under the joint Egyptian-Libyan peace initiative without the addition of the principles of separation of religion and state, the right to self-determination for southern Sudan, the creation of an interim constitution, and the creation of an interim government based on it, AFP reported. Peace talks under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) scheduled to begin in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on 5 September have not taken place - as a result of the non-appearance of the rebel negotiating team, according to the official Sudan News Agency (SUNA).

The IGAD secretariat in Nairobi said at the weekend that it was hopeful of a breakthrough in negotiations following the work of permanent negotiating committees in the city in recent weeks. These government and SPLM/A committees were working on ways to build on the Declaration of Principles and work towards agreement on a ceasefire, separation of religion and state, and the organisation of a constitutional conference, officials stated.