According to an assistant, South Sudan President Salva Kiir is urging six other regional leaders to back Sudan’s political problems.
Tutkew Gatluak Manime, Kiir’s security affairs adviser, claimed the South Sudanese leader is in Kenya to witness the signing of a cease-fire deal between the Congolese government and the March 23 (M23) rebels.
He said that the South Sudanese leader will take advantage of the chance to encourage regional leaders to support efforts to settle the political situation in neighboring Sudan.
“He [Kiir] will utilize that occasion to seek regional leaders’ backing for the Sudanese peace effort,” Manime stated.
The South Sudanese leader is allegedly advocating for regional engagement in measures to secure the implementation of the 2 October 2020 agreement.
The peace accord allowed Sudan’s armed and unarmed opposition organizations to join the transitional government, increasing representation of the country’s periphery during the interim period until elections.
The peace agreement, however, omitted the two most significant rebel factions.
The interim administration was supposed to talk with the remaining rebels in order to bring them into the transition.
Sudan’s foreign partners should advocate for security sector reform that reduces the size and political domination of a freshly enlarged military while paying and supporting the government’s expenditure obligations in the periphery.
The Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the civilian Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) reached a power-sharing agreement in August 2019.
As a result, a hybrid civilian-military administration was formed, entrusted with rejuvenating the nation’s faltering economy and directing the country to elections. The signatories also promised to hold negotiations with militants in regions ignored by Khartoum in order to resolve decades of war. The discussions took conducted in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, and resulted in an agreement on October 3, 2020.
The deal excludes Sudan’s two most powerful and politically significant armed movements: a SPLA/M-N division headed by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu that operates in the Two Areas, and a SLA/M faction led by Abdel Wahid al-Nur that has strongholds in central Darfur.
While the Fur ethnic group and the internally displaced in Darfur support Wahid’s cause, Aziz’s side has support from the Nuba and other communities in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states.
Unlike the agreement’s rebel signatories, who are militarily degraded after a succession of losses by Khartoum in 2015 and 2016, the two holdout organizations maintain significant ground strength.
Both have resisted signing the accord and are unlikely to do so for a variety of reasons, including dissatisfaction with the security forces’ ongoing control of the transitional government and their demand for real national discourse as a prerequisite to an inclusive peace pact.
