23 June 2009
World, U.S. Support Sudan Peace Efforts, U.S. Official Says
Washington — The international community and the United States support efforts by Sudan’s North and South to complete the 2005 peace accord to ensure the peaceful transformation of Africa’s largest country, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg says.
“We are facing some very important milestones in the near future. They will set the foundation, for better or for worse, over the very future of Sudan and for the region as a whole,” Steinberg said at a June 23 forum for support of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended a two-decade civil war. “The stakes are enormous.”
Steinberg said that the focus now is on efforts to make the process fair, open, transparent and consistent with the spirit and intent of the peace accord.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which is sometimes called the Naivasha Agreement for the place where it was signed, set a series of agreements between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the Sudanese government. It was intended to end a two-decade-old civil war between the North and the South, help establish a democratic government and provide for sharing oil revenues. It also set a timetable for Southern Sudan to hold a referendum on its independence. The current coalition government ends in 18 months with the Southern referendum.
Nearly 2 million people died and another 4 million left their homes between 1983 and 2005 as a civil war raged over differences of ideology, ethnicity and religion.
“The international community and the United States supports your efforts to realize the promise of the CPA. The commitments that we made together in Naivasha, and through our presence here today, reflect a commitment of all of us to see that promise is realized,” Steinberg said.
But Steinberg said that everyone recognizes, at the same time, that dealing with the problems of North-South and CPA implementation means that all of the challenges in Sudan are interconnected.
U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan Scott Gration said there have been four days of talks between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement representatives leading up to the forum. It is the first high-level event on the peace accord since its signing in 2005, he said.
“Although much progress has been made in the past four and a half years, there’s still much that remains to be done,” Gration said. “With less than 19 months to go, our work is cut out for us, and we have to set a foundation for Sudan for peace, security and prosperity.”
Representatives from nearly 20 nations attended the forum in Washington, which was called by Gration. President Obama appointed Gration to help encourage world interest in the peace arrangement and in completing negotiations.
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