Nuba Vision
Volume 2, Issue 3, April 2003
The Peace Talks on The Three Central Areas
On 4
th March 2003 talks began in Keran (in Kenya) to settle the issues of the three central areas to the conflict (Nuba Mountains, Southern Blue Nile and Abyei). Prior to the negotiations Nuba delegates from the Government and SPLA/M sides held two meetings of consultation. However, it appears from the consultation that they have differences over some basic issues. At the beginning of the talks, the Government delegation insisted that every region should appoint a leader for each of the three areas among its delegates to lead the delegation, while the SPLA wanted one single delegation to be led by Nihal Deng. However, a compromised was made and they agreed on the negotiations to be conducted in three separate committees, representing the interests of each region.During the discussion on Nuba issue the government proposed agenda, which include:
1. System of Government.
2. Development.
3. Security arrangement.
4. The mechanism of achieving what they had agreed upon while the SPLA agenda include:
1) Self-determination for the Nuba. 2) Separation of religion from the state.
3) Self-governing for the Nuba.
4) Wealth sharing.
5) Power sharing. They both agreed only on the power and wealth sharing but they disagree on the rest of the agenda.
The delegates spent Most of the time hammering out modalities. Abyei was the most difficult of all. Their committee never managed to meet, since the GOS remained determined to have the delegation led by the Missirya Brigadier, although they themselves recognised that this was not in compliance with the criteria agreed upon by the two parties. The Nuba Mountains committee remained stalled on the issue of the ‘denial of the right to self-determination’ as a root cause of the war, with the SPLM maintaining that this was indeed one of the root causes of the conflict, although it emerged at a later stage, and the GOS refusing to accept the SPLM argument. The Southern Blue Nile committee was the only one able to make some progress and a number of possible solutions to the conflict were listed by both parties, although without reaching any agreement.
The talks on the three regions ended on 15
th March with very little progress made and the next round of talks on the three areas will resume in one-month time from where they have left them. Overall, there was a general feeling at Karen that the two sides are not ready for peace and surely not ready to share the administration of the country. The lack of trust between the two camps was extraordinary and often one party would refuse an acceptable solution or proposition simply because it had been voiced by the opposing party. It had to be said that many of the people in the three delegations had not participated in the Machakos talks, hence they lack experience. In addition, there is no representation of the political parties or civil societies from the three regions in the peace talks. Their presence is essential because these are the people, who have experience on political issues and theyare the ones who represent the region constituencies.It is believed that both sides came to the talks with very strong pre-conditions and very rigid mandates and positions. Neither of the two was really interested in reaching an agreement on the three areas at this stage. It is important in the next round of talks to include the politicians from these areas and representatives from civil societies to strengthen the negotiations, so that the issue can move ahead quickly with the Machakos process to meet IGAD deadline.
The Government delegation after returning to Sudan made a number of meetings to brief Nuba community in Khartoum and elsewhere about the talks in Karen. However, many of those attended these meetings were not impressed and they were not pleased with at least two things, which are: the way the Government (Nuba) delegation was chosen to the peace talks and the agenda drawn for the negotiations. They believed that the Government delegation should have included Nuba politicians and representatives from Nuba civil society in the delegation and It should have adopted the Kampala and Kauda resolutions plus the Nuba position paper presented to Alan Guolty, UK Envoy for Peace and the Sudanese Committee initiative and not Kadugli recent position paper.