A small bit of good news to lighten the gloom

Honoring a commitment made to the UN to reach a deal by the end of the year, the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army signed a preliminary peace accord on Friday night that could end the civil war between the northern and southern regions of Sudan that has gone on for over 20 years.

While some details supposedly still remain to be settled, the major issues have been agreed and it's expected that a final agreement will be signed in January, as I noted on Thursday. However, I have to temper the enthusiasm some by noting that the outline of this agreement was laid down over six months ago and it's taken this long to agree on implementation. And as we all know, the devil is in the details. Still, right now no one seems to be envisioning any major problems.

The fighting between the mostly-Muslim north and the Christian and animist south has been driven both by religion and economics. In each case, the southerners felt they were being treated unfairly by the northerners, first by the imposition of Muslim law and later by biased distribution of the benefits of the oil fields discovered in 1983.

Under the agreement,

the government and the southern rebels agreed to share political power and the region's oil wealth, merge their armies and hold a referendum in six years to give southerners ... the right to decide to whether they wish to secede from the rest of Sudan....

It's important to note that this does not directly affect the catastrophe in Darfur. That involves a separate group of rebels, even though there is some overlap in concerns. However,

American officials said that bringing the southern rebels into the government could make it easier for Sudan to reach out to other rebel movements in the western part of the country.

That remains to be seen. There is another, darker, possibility, which I noted back on June 2 in reporting the initial agreement:

The fear among some is that the peace settlement between north and south will allow the government to shift military forces and resources against Darfur. Ominously, Sudan vice president Ali Osman Taha told a rally celebrating the peace accord that

[o]ne of the first fruits of peace will be the extinguishing of the conflict in Darfur....

We will begin tomorrow to focus our efforts, to turn over the page of war in Darfur as the page of conflict and killing was turned over in the south.

While some may take comfort in his linking of moves to peace between north and south with Darfur, I find it hard to find such solace in the words of someone who in the present situation uses the word "extinguish."

It's a time to feel good about the (apparent) ending of one conflict but not a time to let it lead us to relax our attention to another.

Footnote: Among those attending the signing was

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who committed assistance from his country and from the African Union to try to make the deal stick. "Africa begins the year 2005 on a very good footing," Mr. Mbeki said, adding, "Let's party!"

Let's hope that his exuberance proves justified.