Sudan’s Peace Negotiations Move Forward

Juba serves as a meeting place for the Sudanese peace talks. (Wikimedia Commons)

Negotiations for peace between the northern track of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the national government started in Juba on January 21. According to Dio Matok, a spokesman of the South Sudanese team mediating the talks, the parties should come to a final agreement by January 24. However, the eastern track, which deals with peace processes governing the country’s eastern region, postponed negotiations to January 30 to give both parties more time to prepare.  

Leaders of the Forces for Freedom and Change, a political coalition comprising civilian and rebel groups, started a boycott against the eastern Sudan peace conference, claiming that the chosen delegates were too representative of former-President Omar al-Bashir’s base. Other groups also joined the protest against remnants of the deposed regime, such as tribal leaders of eastern Sudan and the Red Sea University.

As for the Darfur track, Matok said negotiators had agreed on issues including transitional justice, government, and land distribution. They have yet to reach an agreement on security, a topic which is slated for January 27.

While the mediating team admits that negotiations with SPLM-North “are a little delayed,” six points of the framework are settled, though the group’s calls for secularism and self-determination have gone ignored.

After a two-week break, SPLM and the government reinitiated negotiations on January 15.

Matok believes that a peace agreement will be achieved by mid-February, at which point the parties will discuss details. 

The mediators expressed appreciation for the support of the international community during the ongoing negotiations. Britain, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and the U.S. have worked to help Sudan reckon with terrorism and economic strife. The negotiating team hopes that the international community will provide financial resources to the country throughout the peace process, all while denying that the negotiations have faced slowdowns. Delays, the team claims, are a side effect of the presence of all of the tracks, or regional representatives, of the country.