CAMPAIGNERS for a sustainable peace in Sudan have pressed the US and UK governments, guarantors of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), to prevent its unravelling.
The Archbishop of Sudan, Dr Daniel Deng Bul Yak, called on the US Episcopal Church’s General Convention this week to “retain the peace of Sudan as a top priority”.
Addressing the Convention in California, he said that the Church in Sudan had considerable evidence that militia groups and tribesmen were being rearmed in a bid to destabilise the CPA.
The world had focused on Darfur whilst thousands died in the south. It must refocus on to the CPA, he said. “If the CPA fails in Sudan, there will certainly be no peace in Darfur either. . . If this and other countries are guarantors of the CPA, then why is the international community allowing this violence to continue.”
UK campaigners have called on the British Government to marshal the international community to support peace and stability in Sudan.
The CPA was signed by the Khartoum government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement in 2005. It allows for elections, which have been postponed, and a referendum in 2011 on whether the mainly Christian south should remain with the mainly Muslim north.
Last month, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that, with only 18 months left before the referendum, there was “an urgency for both parties to the agreement, and the international community which helped broker and support it, to demonstrate their renewed commitment to implement the agreement fully”.
Dr Williams, who called for widespread support and prayer for a sustainable peace, issued his statement to coincide with the Sudan Day of Action last month.
A spokeswoman for the Day of Action, Alexandra Taliadoros, said that the campaign would continue to apply pressure to the British Government. The day had highlighted the plight of millions of people affected by famine, drought, and conflict in Sudan.
Signatures are being sought for a petition to be delivered to Parliament in December, calling on international supporters to “recommit urgently to supporting the implementation of the CPA across the whole of Sudan in these final few months of the Agreement’s duration, recognizing the vital and indispensible nature of such international support”.
Ms Taliadoros said that the postponed elections, precursors to the referendum, were now due next February, but could be postponed again.
The relations with Sudan remain complicated, not least by the issue of a warrant by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for the arrest of President Omar al-Bashir, for suspected war crimes in Darfur.
Last month, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the UN Security Council that it was Sudan’s responsibility to arrest President Bashir. If, however, the African Union and Arab League influenced the Sudanese to try the case in their own national court, “we would not need to further intervene.” The Khartoum government has said it does not plan to arrest its President.
The United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) has 13,455 soldiers and is operating at two-thirds of its strength. It said that the situation in Sudan was “calm”, although bandits were still carrying out raids.
An estimated 300,000 people have been killed and another 2.7 million people forced from their homes since the violence in Dafur erupted in 2003.
Public hearings, chaired by the former South African President Thabo Mbeki, were held in in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and the West Darfur towns of El Geneina and Zalingei, to examine the causes of the conflict in the region and find a route to peace, UNAMID said.
Sudanese from both the north and south, who attended a United States Institute of Peace think-tank last month, said that they had no desire to return to conflict. “There’s no going back to war. We are not going to fight again,” said Bakri Saed, a delegate from Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Malik Agar Eyre, the head of delegation for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), said that the costs of war were too high for a return to conflict. “So we don’t have an alternative other than the CPA.”
There remain many areas of concern. One is a recent census that the South says greatly underestimated the population in the region, putting it at a disadvantage when it came to dividing oil revenues from the southern oilfields. Another is the unresolved question where the borders between the regions are to be drawn.
|
back to News
previous story
|
next story 
back to top
