With representatives of more than 30 countries and organizations convening in Washington tomorrow to reinvigorate Sudan’s troubled Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA, we’re releasing our latest strategy paper – Sudan: The countdown – that examines the difficult current state of play in Sudan as a number of crucial decisions loom on the horizon. The paper, authored by Professor Gerard Prunier and Enough Project Policy Assistant Maggie Fick, argues that the international community needs to adopt a new approach in this crucial period before the 2011 referendum in the South, which will decide whether Sudan remains united or splits in two. The self-determination referendum is the final benchmark outlined by the CPA, which ended a more than 20-year civil war between northern and southern Sudan.
John Norris, Enough’s executive director notes:
One of the key problems with the CPA to date has been the fact that the parties to the CPA, particularly President Bashir’s National Congress Party, have not faced any cost from the international community for a failure to implement key provisions of the agreement. Unless that changes, conflict in Sudan will only intensify.
Tomorrow’s conference, organized by the Obama administration, will bring together key signatories to the CPA as well as many of the international actors whose engagement will be vital to bolstering the peace agreement, which has suffered from delays in implementation and the increased violence in southern Sudan. The pattern of selective CPA implementation exhibited by the northern government and a recent spate of inter-communal violence throughout the South are threatening to derail the CPA process before 2011.
Enough policy assistant and the paper’s co-author Maggie Fick pointed out:
The myriad challenges and risks facing Sudan in the next 19 months cannot be addressed and mitigated unless the international community adopts a new approach to the crucial final stages of CPA implementation.