More pressure on parties urged in prelude to talks resumption

As talks to end Sudan's 20-year civil war resume in Kenya on 17 February, the international community is being urged to bring more pressure to bear on the warring parties to expedite the process and reach agreement on the pending issues of power-sharing and the three disputed regions. The talks, facilitated by the regional body, IGAD [Inter-Governmental Authority on Development], in the town of Naivasha, were adjourned last week at the request of the government delegation, whose members wanted time to perform the Islamic pilgrimage of Hajj in Saudi Arabia. Although a final peace agreement between the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) is in sight, analysts said, recent setbacks affecting the talks, and the escalation of fighting in the west, pose serious threats to the country's peaceful transition. The international community must therefore set new deadlines before which both parties must agree on the pending issues of power-sharing and the status of Abyei, the Nuba mountains and southern Blue Nile, they said. John Prendergast, the co-director of the Africa programme of the Brussels-based think-tank, the International Crisis Group, told IRIN that the setbacks affecting the talks were part of the Sudanese government's strategy to exploit divisions within the SPLM/A in order to delay the peace process. "There is a big problem right now. The government wants to delay the talks for as long as it can in order to continue its offensive in the western part of the country," Prendergast told IRIN. "The government is trying to buy time. It is delaying the process because it knows the SPLM/A is internally divided, especially on the issue of Abyei, and this could eventually cause a crisis within the movement," the said. He criticised the international community's "quiet diplomacy" in the context of the crisis in Darfur, and urged both the British and United States governments to "make it clear to both parties that many of the incentives on the table would be taken away". The incentives to the parties include the interest by many international donors to scale up their assistance to Sudan. At a time when additional pressure was needed to ensure that the parties made the final push towards a peace agreement, Prendergast said, the international community had decided to engage in "quiet diplomacy" without criticising the government's deliberate attempt to delay the talks, or its abuses on the Darfur battlefront. "The government is happy so long as they are not under pressure," he said. "The current policy of quiet diplomacy is not working. We have empirical evidence that the regime responds to pressure." So far, the parties have missed two deadlines for a final agreement - the New Year and 20 January. The last round of talks made substantial headway on the key issues of wealth-sharing and security arrangements during a six-year transition period. A tentative agreement was reached on the Nuba mountains and southern Blue Nile, but a compromise position had yet to be reached on the status of Abyei, according to observers. According to the UK-based think-tank Justice Africa, the war in Darfur was, apart from being a humanitarian and human rights disaster in its own right, an "extremely serious" threat to the viability of the peace agreement. The conflict, it said, exposed one of the main weak points in the IGAD negotiating strategy, in which only major armed groups had been included, thereby sending the message to other constituencies excluded from power that they would be better off pursuing their political agendas by forcing the government to negotiate by facilitation. "If the [Darfur] war continues, political and economic stability cannot be achieved in Sudan," Justice Africa said in its latest briefing report. "It would be a terrible tragedy if peace in the south were to be achieved just as Sudan enters a new and equally vicious war in Darfur. As well as humanitarian assistance, the Darfur war needs immediate political attention by the international community," it added. An estimated 600,000 Sudanese have been displaced, of whom about 110,000 have fled to neighbouring Chad since February 2003, due to fighting between the government and the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A). There are also potential problems due to the differing interpretation of the Machakos Protocol, the core blueprint signed between the government and SPLM/A in July 2002, which set the pace for the current negotiations, according to Athian Majak Alou, a member of the Nairobi-based NGO, Bahr al-Ghazal Youth Development Agency. On the one hand, Alou told IRIN, the north was giving peace a chance in the hope that Sudan would remain one country after the transitional period, yet the south, on the other hand, interpreted the protocol's provision for self-determination to include a possible secession from Sudan. "The problem with this peace process is that it has different interpretations and expectations between the north and the south," he said.