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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.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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