Sudan, February 23: Following a secession referendum in Sudan, the Sudanese foreign minister says North Sudan seeks to become the first country to open an embassy in the South.
“Sudan will work to be the first country to open an embassy in Juba to mark the establishment of positive diplomatic ties with the newly born South Sudan State,” Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Ahmed Karti said in a statement on Tuesday, a Media correspondent reported.
“The newly-born state will not be a barrier between us and the current neighboring countries in eastern and central African, but it will be a gate and a model for the distinguished relations with these countries,” he added.
In a landmark referendum in January, the South Sudanese went to the polls to secede from the North. South Sudan’s independence referendum was the result of a peace agreement in 2005, brokered by the African Union and the United Nations that ended decades of civil war between the North and South.
Fought over differences on ethnicity, religion, ideology and oil, the prolonged civil war claimed the lives of at least two million people.
Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, however, has said the divisions between the two regions are the legacy of the former colonial power, Britain, warning that South Sudan would face instability in the wake of the secession.
The United States and the European Union had campaigned for years to split the major African country, voicing support for the secession of the oil-rich, mainly Christian South.
The effort openly promoted racism as well as sectarianism, developing rivalries between Arabs versus Africans and Christians against Muslims.
——–Agencies