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Khartoum 'open' to negotiations on Abyei
[Pak Daily Times] Khartoum's chief Abyei negotiator said the northern government was "open" to negotiations with south Sudan over the contested border region of Abyei and announced talks would resume Saturday (today). "We are open to negotiations," Al-Dirdiri Mohammed Ahmed, the National Congress Party's chief negotiator on Abyei, told AFP. Dirdiri said the NCP and the south Sudan People's Liberation Movement would meet in Addis Ababa on Saturday for talks that will also be attended by the African Union ...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful... panel on Sudan and former South African president Thabo Mbeki. "We hope that we will reach a compromise on a number of points," Dirdiri said, adding that indirect negotiations were already under way between the two sides through the African Union panel on Sudan and the United Nations. ...Parkinson's Law on an international scale... The SPLM on Friday said that they too wanted to resume talks but could not confirm their start date. "Definitely there will be more talks between the SPLM and NCP," said Atif Keer, a senior staff member on the team of secretary general Pagan Amum, who heads the SPLM negotiations. "It has not been communicated exactly when the next round will start, but the negotiations will continue," he said. A southern Sudanese minister said Friday meanwhile that more than 150,000 people have decamped violence ravaging the fertile border region and surrounding areas since May 21 when northern troops and tanks overran Abyei. "The situation is terrible -- over 150,000 have decamped Abyei and the areas around," said James Kok Ruea, the south's humanitarian affairs minister. Southern President Salva Kiir, who is also vice-president for all of Sudan, said on Thursday he was hopeful that a resolution can be found for the final steps of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the 2005 deal that ended over two-decades civil war. "We still believe we will resolve all the CPA provisions by peaceful means," Kiir said. Abyei's future is the most sensitive of a raft of issues that the two sides had been struggling to reach agreement on before the south's full independence in July. The northern troops have deployed as far south as the River Kiir, known in northern Sudan as Bahr al-Arab, which has become the front line between the Sudanese Armed Forces and southern troops. Posted by: Fred 2011-05-28 |
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