Annan pledges UN support for comprehensive peace agreement

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has pledged the UN's continuing support for the talks aimed at ending conflict in southern Sudan. He said the peace process had reached a critical phase with the signing on 26 May of three key protocols on power-sharing and the contested areas. In a message read during the formal launch of the final phase of talks between the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM/A) in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on 5 June, Annan said the UN would send an advance team to support negotiations between the two parties. The Sudanese government and the SPLM/A have signed six protocols, which, together with two annexes, are to make up a comprehensive peace agreement. Technical committees are expected - within two months - to prepare annexes governing the implementation of the protocols and comprehensive ceasefire arrangements and guarantees. Muhammad Ahmad Dirdeiry, the Sudanese deputy ambassador in Nairobi, told IRIN on Monday that work of the final phase would start on 22 June. Dirdeiry said the two protocols - on a comprehensive ceasefire and on modalities of implementation - together with the other protocols already signed "will together form a comprehensive peace agreement, the signing of which would signal the pre-interim period" lasting six months, and lead to an interim period of six years. At the end of the period, "a referendum on whether to remain in a united Sudan" or separate would be held in the south, Dirdeiry told IRIN. Efforts by IRIN to obtain comment from the SPLM/A were unsuccessful. Annan also called for a "concerted international response" to the crisis in the western Sudanese state of Darfur, where fighting between government forces and allied militias on the one hand and two armed rebel groups on the other hand has displaced up to two million people. "The crisis in Darfur continues to cause appalling suffering that demands a concerted international response," said Annan in his message.