Garang leaves venue of peace talks

The leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), John Garang, left the Kenyan town of Naivasha, venue of the Sudanese peace talks, on Thursday, according to an SPLM/A official. Samson Kwaje, an SPLM/A spokesman, told IRIN on Friday that "since [First] Vice-President [Ali Uthman Muhammad] Taha is not in Naivasha there was no point in Dr Garang hanging around". "He left on Thursday to attend to other business," Kwaje said, adding that Garang would be back "as soon as Taha returns". Taha, the head of the government delegation to the talks, returned to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, on 17 April for consultations with his government over the talks, a Sudanese government official told IRIN at the time. Kwaje said committees at the talks, brokered by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development [IGAD] were continuing to discuss two contentious issues. These were "power-sharing in the disputed regions and the law governing the national capital". The government of Sudan was insisting that shari'ah law must continue to apply in Khartoum because the two sides had earlier agreed that it would apply in north of the country, "and Khartoum is in the north", Muhammad Ahmad Dirdeiry, the Sudanese deputy ambassador in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, told IRIN. Kwaje, however, said Khartoum was "a special case as the national capital of the whole of Sudan, not just the north, and should therefore be exempt from shari'ah". He said the talks were not in trouble. "Committees from the two sides are still talking and meeting with the IGAD ] secretariat. We are hopeful that by the time the two leaders return we will have made very good progress to resolve the outstanding issues," Kwaje told IRIN. For his part, Dirdeiry said he was hopeful that an expected IGAD proposal would serve to bridge the gap between the two sides. "We are hoping that whatever proposal they [IGAD] come up with will be balanced and acceptable to both sides." He warned, however, that any proposal "must not breach the provision in the Machakos protocol on the relationship between state and religion". The protocol was signed by the government and the SPLM/A sides in August 2002 in the southwestern Kenyan town of Machakos.