Press Release: An All Sudan Solution

(Washington, D.C.) November 14, 2007: As tensions between the North and South of Sudan continue to mount, the Darfur movement – and the policymakers and negotiators working on Sudan – must broaden their efforts to achieving a sustainable and comprehensive solution for all of Sudan, according to an ENOUGH Project strategy paper released today.

Authored by Roger Winter, a Sudan expert who helped to broker the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the North and South, and John Prendergast, co-chair of the ENOUGH Project, the report details the linkages between Darfur and the rest of Sudan and the need for a holistic approach in efforts to restore peace to the country.

“The end to Sudan’s crises rests in a common solution: a country-wide democratic transformation that is driven by strong, internationally monitored peace agreements for the South, Darfur, and the East and delivered through the timely, free and fair elections mandated by the CPA,” says Winter.

ENOUGH states that the ruling National Congress Party’s multiple efforts to undermine the CPA have greatly endangered the tenuous peace in the region. According to the report, the NCP has:

• delayed for months the release of funds for the census and created numerous obstacles to the drawing of boundaries between North and South, both necessary prerequisites for CPA-mandated elections;
• refused to withdraw its military forces from oil fields in the South in accordance with the CPA-stipulated timetable; and
• rejected the “final and binding” Abyei Boundary Commission report, which has frozen all efforts to establish a new local administration in violence-prone and oil-rich Abyei, which is entitled to its own referendum.

Along with other members of the international community, Winter and Prendergast state that the United States has a central leadership role to play – both in supporting the implementation of the CPA and the peace deal in Eastern Sudan, as well as in helping to broker an accord in Darfur.

Specifically, ENOUGH calls on the U.S. to ramp up its diplomatic investments and efforts to work multilaterally, including increased pressure on any party attempting to undermine peace; strengthen U.S. and broader international support for the CPA; and discontinue any plan to entertain negotiations outside the framework provided by the CPA, a course of action that could actually hasten a return to war in the South.

“All of Sudan’s peoples suffer from the same fundamental problem – the absence of democratic governance,” says Prendergast. “The international community therefore must conceive, achieve, and sustain an all-Sudan solution.”

To read “An All-Sudan Solution: Linking Darfur and the South,” go to www.enoughproject.org.