Sudanese Talking Despite Fighting

As top Sudanese government officials and rebel leaders hold peace talks aimed at ending their country’s 19-year civil war, forces back home have been engaged in some of the fiercest fighting in months, resulting in heavy battlefield casualties and more suffering for hundreds of thousands of hungry civilians.

Despite the fighting, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Walter Kansteiner said the peace talks currently underway in Machakos, about 35 miles southeast of Nairobi, could bring both sides closer to a peace agreement.

U.S., British and Norwegian representatives are observing the talks, which are being chaired by retired Kenyan Lt. Gen. Lazaro Sumbeiywo. Kansteiner said the presence of international observers has changed the tone of the talks.

“There’s still lingering [sentiment on both sides] that we’ve fought too long to compromise our principles,” Kansteiner said during a meeting here late Monday with a small group of reporters. But “there’s also enough talk that ‘our people are weary of this stuff [and] we need to do a deal.’ ”

The conflict has claimed more than 2 million lives, largely because of hunger. The war pits Sudan’s Islamic government in the north against militias in the mainly Christian and animist south. The fighting has intensified since 1999, when European and Asian companies started pumping oil from the western part of Upper Nile region.

The Sudanese government has used the oil proceeds to buy more sophisticated weapons while the rebels have attempted, with limited success, to target oil installations operated by foreign companies.

Kansteiner, who described the peace talks as the most promising in recent years, was expected to meet President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, this week. Kansteiner said he would urge the Sudanese leader to allow United Nations food drops into war-ravaged areas of the country, particularly in rebel-controlled areas in the western part of the Upper Nile region.

Aid agencies say the government, which has been known to use food as a weapon, has denied access to U.N. flights for the last few months, cutting off supplies to hundreds of thousands of people.

Bashir struck a conciliatory note this week when he called on the main rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, or SPLA, to help “build a country dominated by forgiveness and reconciliation, led by the rule of law.” In a televised speech and a military parade in Khartoum marking the June 30, 1989, coup that brought him to power, Bashir said he hoped the negotiations in Machakos would help end the war.

But even as Bashir was addressing the nation, his soldiers were bombing Kapoeta, a strategic town that was captured last month by the SPLA. This week, aid workers told reporters that nine civilians were killed and many others seriously wounded when soldiers dropped bombs from a Russian-made Antonov plane.

The SPLA also acknowledged this week that its fighters had withdrawn from Gogrial, another strategic town 550 miles southwest of Khartoum, after coming under heavy attack.

Kansteiner said the recent heavy fighting probably meant that both sides were jockeying to improve their position in the talks.

A report issued last week by the International Crisis Group, a respected think tank based in Brussels, called on the United States to craft a “more robust” effort that fulfills President Bush’s intention of bringing peace to Sudan.

John Prendergast, director of the group’s Africa programs and a top Sudan policymaker during the Clinton administration, wrote in the report that the issue of self-determination for the south “is certain to be the make-or-break point of greatest contention.”

“To ensure the unity of Sudan ... power will have to be shared and rights guaranteed through constitutional and security arrangements, backed by international guarantees,” he wrote.