Sudan and South Sudan’s leaders will meet today as international pressure mounts to settle long-running disputes that have brought the former civil war foes to the brink of renewed conflict.
The rival delegations have held drawn-out talks that began several months before South Sudan split from what was
Africa’s biggest nation in July 2011, following a landslide independence vote after decades of war.
Among issues on the table today are expected to be ownership of contested regions along their frontier —
especially the flashpoint Abyei region — and the setting up of a demilitarised border zone after bloody clashes.
The buffer zone would also potentially cut support for rebel forces in Sudan’s Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile
regions, where Sudan accuses Juba of supplying former civil war comrades whom Khartoum now seeks to wipe out.
Multiple rounds of talks have failed to find solutions, but both sides have said they are now optimistic, given the
looming threat of UN Security Council sanctions and the fact that the presidents are meeting face-to-face.
We are still facing difficulties… but we are hopeful we can reach a deal,” said Atif Kiir, spokesman for South
Sudan’s delegation to the African Union mediated talks in the Ethiopian capital.
The summit is to reach a comprehensive agreement between the two countries, so let us hope,” his Sudanese counterpart Badr el-din Abdullah told reporters late yesterday, when negotiations stretched into the night.
A UN deadline passed yesterday for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and his Southern counterpart Salva Kiir to
settle the raft of issues unresolved when the South became the world’s newest nation last year.
The deadline was set after brutal border clashes broke out in March, when Southern troops and tanks briefly wrested
the valuable Heglig oil field from Khartoum’s control, and Sudan launched brutal bombing raids in response.
—————-(AFP)