Sudan, South Sudan meet to resolve bitter dispute

Top negotiators from Sudan and rival South Sudan Top negotiators from Sudan and rival South Sudan have met in the latest round of African Union mediated talks to resolve bitter dispute, officials said Monday. \"Yesterday we had a meeting, and we tabled our positions,\" said Atif Kiir, a spokesman for Juba\'s delegation.
The latest round of talks comes a week after Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and his South Sudanese counterpart Salva Kiir exchanged a symbolic handshake at an AU summit.
South Sudan\'s top negotiator Pagan Amum is expected to address the media later on Monday.
On Saturday, South Sudan said it was cancelling planned face-to-face peace talks with Sudan after accusing Khartoum of launching a new air raid on its territory.
Sudan denied bombing its southern neighbour, saying it had targeted Darfuri rebels inside its own territory.
Late on Saturday, the African Union said it had managed to bring the foes back to the negotiating table.
The negotiations to settle disputes stemming from the South\'s independence in July last year stalled in April, but resumed in May.
The African neighbours came close to war when border fighting escalated in April, the worst violence since South Sudan split off and declared its independence under a 2005 agreement that ended decades of civil war.
The two have recently been trying to reconcile their many differences via talks, but Ebrahim Gandour, a senior official in President Omar Al Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP), said it was hard to envisage progress without first resolving border security issues.
“We cannot cooperate on the economy, politics, oil, whatever, when the other party is endangering our security,” Gandour told Reuters in an interview. “We cannot build trust when the other party is supporting rebel movements with weapons and sometimes with personnel.”
The duo’s messy divorce left a long list of unresolved conflicts including disagreements over fees for South Sudan’s oil exports and the demarcation of their shared border, as well as lingering suspicions on both sides that the other country is supporting rebel opponents.
Khartoum accuses Juba of supporting insurgencies in two of its southern border states and the western region of Darfur, the scene of a near-decade-long rebellion. Juba denies this, but some diplomats find the claim credible.
Sudan wanted to build “very strong” cooperation with South Sudan, Gandour added, but he questioned whether Juba was interested in a lasting settlement.
“Our history of talking to the other party will make us very cautious in being so optimistic because whenever we feel we are close to striking a deal the other party breaches whatever we had agreed upon,” said Gandour, a member of NCP’s leadership team.
Talks sponsored by the African Union in Addis Ababa over where to agree a demilitarised buffer zone — seen as a first step to ending hostilities — have broken down several times.
The two countries also remain wide apart over how much landlocked South Sudan should pay to export its oil through Sudanese pipelines.
In January, Juba shut off its entire output after Khartoum started taking oil for what it called unpaid export fees. Both economies badly need the oil.
The two face the threat of sanctions from the UN Security Council unless they resolve all disputes before August 2. The Council has already expressed concern over delays in the talks.
Gandour said South Sudan seemed to hope that friendly Western powers would pressure Sudan - a country isolated since the International Criminal Court indicted Al Bashir for war crimes in Darfur — into a deal on its terms.
“You know what they [South Sudan] are counting on is that we come to August 2 ... then it will be taken to international arbitration where their friends can take decisions in their interest,” Gandour said.
“This is their main aim. This is why they will be dragging their feet to August 2 but I don’t think this is a very smart idea,” he said.
Some two million people died in the conflict between the mainly Muslim north and the South, where most people subscribe to Christian or African animist beliefs. The war — fought over ideology, ethnicity, religion and oil – lasted for all but a few years between 1955 and 2005.