- It has been two years since a landmark peace agreement to end Sudan's 21-year-old civil war between the north and the south, but aid agencies cautioned the international community to ensure the peace process does not stall.
On 9 January 2005, the government of Sudan and the (South) Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement to formally end one of Africa's longest and bloodiest conflicts, in which more than two million are estimated to have died.
In a statement, five aid agencies - CARE, Christian Aid, International Rescue Committee, Oxfam and International Save the Children Alliance - held that despite international attention being focused on Sudan's current Darfur crisis, the implementation of the north-south peace has slipped heavily "behind schedule".
With everyone concentrating on Darfur, the north-south peace "seems to be drifting off the international community's radar screen," said Patty Swahn, of the International Rescue Committee. "The slow progress in implementing the agreement is extremely worrying; if there isn't active support for the peace process, there is a real risk of renewed fighting," he added.
The aid agencies said the possibility of an upsurge in violence was dramatically signalled at the end of November, when fighting broke out in the southern Sudan town of Malakal between SPLM troops and forces aligned to the government in Khartoum, causing more than 150 fatalities and over 400 injuries.
"Insecurity persists in many parts of South Sudan and there is still much work to be done on demobilising the South's many armed groups," aid agencies warned, raising concern about slow progress in addressing the status of Abyei and the transition areas of Blue Nile and southern Kordofan.
"The international community needs to understand how fragile the situation is and to engage actively in supporting the process and holding the parties to account," said Gary McGurk, Assistant Country Director for CARE South Sudan.
The agencies also urged donors and policymakers to pay closer attention to the implementation of the East Sudan Peace Agreement, which was signed in October 2006 between the government of Sudan and the Eritrea-supported Eastern Sudan Front, ending a low-level insurgency that had simmered since the early 1990s, dividing the state of Kassala in two.
The north-south peace and the peace agreements in Darfur and in the East "cannot be treated as three completely separate processes; they are part of the same dynamic," said Hussein Halane of Save the Children.
The international community was urged to promote post-conflict recovery and development, which was said to be vital to the stabilising of the volatile situation in a country with hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people now returning or planning to return to the south.
However, as donors transition to longer-term development aid, it was also said to be essential that the immediate humanitarian needs of Sudan's many vulnerable populations continue to be addressed. After more than 20 years of war, people need to feel the "dividends" of peace in order to firmly break the cycle of conflict. Development aid commitments were still said to be taking time to reach the intended beneficiaries, and the agencies said they feared "the emergence of a funding gap."
While calling for the implementation peace accords in Sudan's south and east, aid agencies urged the donor community to support ordinary Sudanese people benefit rapidly and tangibly from post-conflict aid.
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