President Salva Kiir of South Sudan said he is ready to accept a peace deal to end a civil war and set up an inclusive new government.
The deal being negotiated in Sudan would give the country five vice presidents and also covers security and
power sharing.
“The people of South Sudan are looking for peace and if that arrangement can bring about peace to the people of South Sudan, I am ready to take it,” said Kiir late on Wednesday at a swearing-in ceremony for his foreign minister.
“People talk about exclusivity, nobody is to be left out of the government. I accept it,” he said.
South Sudan erupted in conflict in 2013 because of a dispute between Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar. Tens of thousands have been killed, a quarter of the population has fled their homes and the oil-dependent economy has been wrecked.
A 2015 peace deal briefly halted the fighting but it fell apart after Machar returned to the capital the following year.
The conflict has mostly been fought along ethnic lines, pitting Kiir’s dominant Dinka tribe and its rival, the ethnic Nuer of Machar.
On Monday, Kiir named Nhial Deng Nhial, ex presidential advisor and also his chief negotiator in the Khartoum talks as his new foreign minister, replacing Deng Alor.
NAN reports that on June 22, Kiir declined to work again with rival Riek Machar after their first face-to-face
meeting in almost two years.
“This is simply because we have had enough of him,” government spokesman Michael Makuei said.
The rivals met in neighbouring Ethiopia on its prime minister’s invitation, shaking hands and being coaxed into an awkward embrace as they held direct talks.
They shook hands again as regional heads of state and government met to discuss the civil war in the world’s youngest nation.
But it became clear that while South Sudan’s government was open to having the opposition in the vice president’s role, it would not accept Machar’s return to that post.
Machar fled the country after new fighting erupted in the capital, Juba, in July 2016, ending a brief attempt at peace in which he returned to his role as Kiir’s deputy.
Opposition spokesman Lam Gabriel told the Associated Press that “there was nothing agreed upon in the talks” but that the face-to-face meeting with South Sudan’s president was useful “because we are able to see violence in Salva’s eyes.”
Gabriel also accused the East African regional bloc of favoring South Sudan’s government and putting its own interests ahead of “genuine peace,” adding: “This is completely disappointing.”
The bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, has led several rounds of failed peace talks.
South Sudan’s civil war, which broke out just two years after the country won independence from Sudan, has continued despite repeated attempts at peace deals.
The UN said tens of thousands of people have died and millions have fled to create Africa’s largest refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Millions of others still in the country are near famine, while the warring sides have been blamed for obstructing or slowing the delivery of desperately needed aid.
The latest attempt at a cease-fire in December was violated within hours.
Both sides have been accused of widespread abuses such as gang rapes against civilians, including along ethnic lines.
A number of South Sudan officials have been accused by human rights groups of profiting from the conflict and blocking the path to peace, and the U. S., the largest donor of humanitarian aid, has threatened to withdraw it.
Source: NAN
