The path to development begins in Sudan

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Alexander Nyarko Yeboah – GITFIConline.com

The Sudanese Minister of Information and Culture has hinted that the democratization of Sudan has begun which would end all conflicts and put the country on the path of progress and development.

“It is a great success. We believe that we’ve thus begun the real transformation of Sudan from a dictatorship to a democracy (…) because we are now joined by armed movements of people from all regions of Sudan,” Mr. Fayçal Mohamed Saleh says.

Mr. Saleh made this observation on Monday in an interview with AFP on the sidelines of the historic peace agreement to end 17years of war in Sudan by Sudanese authorities and several rebel movements in Juba, southern Sudan.

“We know that we will face some problems when we start to proceed on the ground but we have this political will and our friends in the army have this political will to make it work,” , Mr. Saleh said.

The agreement was first on the rebel movements in Darfur, where the war that began in 2003 left at least 300,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced, according to the UN. The second was on the rebel movement in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, where the war had affected one million people.

The head of the mediators and advisor to the President of South Sudan on security matters, Tutkew Gatluak, said on Sunday that, “The dream has come true after considerable efforts to reach a peace agreement between the government and the Sudanese Revolutionary Front”.

The Sudanese Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok, in expressing how long it took to come to agreement and the extent of mistrust, said, “When the Juba Declaration was issued in September (2019), everyone expected the peace to be signed within two or three months, but (…) we realized that the issues were of a rare complexity.”

After the failure of the 2006 agreement in Abuja, Nigeria, the 2010 one in Qatar, among many others, the opponents understood that it was not just a security issue, and got to the bottom of the problems that had plagued the country since its independence in 1956.

In that regard, the rebels and the government initialed eight protocols that made up the peace agreement, which were security, land ownership, transitional justice, reparations and compensation, nomadic and pastoral development, wealth sharing, power sharing and the return of refugees and displaced persons.

The agreement stated that the armed movements had to be disbanded and their combatants joined to the regular army. The army would then be reorganized to be representative of all components of the Sudanese people.

Mr. Saleh expressed the Khartoum government’s commitment to the peace agreement by saying, “All the government’s programs are based on peace and if peace is not achieved, none of the transitional government’s programs will be realized.”

According to the United Nations, fighting in Darfur alone left around 300,000 people dead after rebels took up arms in 2003 with former government leaders accused of carrying out genocide and of crimes against humanity.

Conflict in South Kordofan and Blue Nile broke out in 2011, in the wake of South Sudan’s independence, resuming two decades of war.

Forging peace with rebels, therefore, had been the basis of Sudan’s transitional government, which came to power in the months after the overthrow of Bashir in April 2019.

The peace agreement was ratified in the presence of the President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, who served as witness.

Other agreements for the development of the country were signed by political and tribal leaders from several regions of Sudan.