Sudan, Southern Rebels Sign Peace Deal

The Sudanese government and southern rebel groups signed an agreement Sunday that ends one of Africa’s longest wars but leaves unresolved the bloody conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region that has come to overshadow it.

The deal reached after three years of negotiation seeks a comprehensive settlement after 21 years of fighting by allowing southern rebels to share power and oil wealth with the Khartoum government.

“Our people have experienced the bitterness of war.... Peace is indeed going to bring our country abundance,” Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir said. “What was spent on fighting will now be spent on health, education and other services.”

The civil war, which cost an estimated 2 million lives, pitted the central government in the predominantly Muslim north against Christians and animists in the south. Although the war has received relatively little notice in the United States, conservative Christian religious groups, one of President Bush’s core constituencies, have pushed for intervention.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told an audience of several thousand at the signing ceremony here that the agreement was historic and stressed that the two sides must uphold their ends of the bargain. He also urged Khartoum to move swiftly toward peace in the western region of Darfur.

Four months ago, Powell officially designated the violence in Darfur as genocide, saying the Sudanese government bore responsibility for the atrocities. On Friday, the United Nations declared that despite Khartoum’s promises, fighting in Darfur was intensifying.

Powell, whose visit to Nairobi comes in his final days in office, said the two sides “must work together immediately to end the violence and atrocities that continue to occur in Darfur.”

On Saturday, he told reporters that the next steps would be difficult, but that including southern rebel leaders in the Sudanese government might make it easier to compromise with insurgents in Darfur.

The deal includes a number of measures that are politically sensitive and may prove difficult to implement.

It entitles the southern region to organize an autonomous government and constitution and get a share of Sudan’s oil revenue. It calls for the integration of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army into the central government’s military. It makes John Garang, the U.S.-educated rebel leader, first vice president in a new Sudanese government, a post now held by the powerful Ali Osman Mohammed Taha.

It also provides for a referendum after six years that would give the south a chance to declare its independence.

Southern Sudanese at the ceremony, which was held in Kenya’s largest soccer stadium and open to the public, said they had no doubt that the region would vote to break away.

“It is the will of the people,” said a cheerful Rev. Tut Nguoth of the Presbyterian Church of Sudan, whose 2-year-old son, Tak, was waving the flag of the soon-to-be-formed government of southern Sudan.

Nguoth and his family are among several hundred thousand Sudanese who have lived in Kenya permanently or intermittently as civil war raged.

Garang, in comments Saturday, acknowledged that major hurdles remained.

“This is the end of the war, at least in the south ... but it is only the beginning of peace,” the rebel leader said.

He acknowledged that he wouldn’t be moving to Khartoum to take his new job for some time, and noted that authorities faced the “daunting task” of trying to resettle 3 million refugees.

Khartoum has been accused of exploiting foreign leaders’ desire to end the war in the south to deflect international pressure for a pullback of government-allied militias in Darfur. But Taha, the vice president, insisted that Khartoum wanted peace in the west, saying, “We have made our minds together that we are to join hands in trying to resolve the situation in Darfur.”

Powell made clear that the lifting of long-standing sanctions on Sudan depended on Khartoum’s actions in Darfur.

“The United States still has options before it that include sanctions,” he said. “And we do not take any of those options off the table. And we will have to examine what further action the international community can take” through the United Nations Security Council.

He said he hoped the U.S. would be able to move toward normal relations with Sudan.

Sudanese leaders are eager to have the reconstruction aid Washington had promised for the 7.5 million people in the south, who have little in the way of roads or other infrastructure. Powell said he knew the cost would be high, but didn’t say how much aid the U.S. would provide. He said he expected others to contribute as well, particularly the European Union.

David Mozersky, an analyst in Nairobi with International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization, said the deal was a “very, very positive development” for Sudan, but that it would be difficult to implement as long as fighting continued in Darfur.

He said one threat to the deal was the lack of strong civil institutions in the impoverished south to support the rebuilding. Another danger was a potential lack of will on the part of Khartoum, which he said had often reneged on promises.

Although the deal offers clear benefits for those in the south, he said, “the benefit for Khartoum is much harder to see.” Among other things, the central government risks losing oil revenue if the south goes its own way.