Sudan church leaders elated at peace accord, but hard work starts

by Fredrick Nzwili
Ecumenical News International

NAIROBI — Sudanese church leaders have expressed happiness at the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in Nairobi on Sunday, but warn the actual work for holding in check a decades‑long racial, religious and economic conflict has just begun.

      “Many people in southern Sudan are joyful about this signing of peace,” Archbishop Joseph Marona of the Episcopal Church of Sudan told Ecumenical News International. “The peace means a lot to them because southern Sudan has suffered for many years.”

      Marona, however, challenged churches to take a lead in reconciling a traumatized community, and he noted the real work for peace was just starting. “People have killed their relatives,” said the bishop. “This is very painful. We have to teach them not to pay wrong for wrong. They also have to forgive themselves.”

      After two years of negotiations in Kenya, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army leader, John Garang, and Sudan’s vice‑president Ali Osman Taha signed the accord to the sounds of jubilation from Sudanese people present at a ceremony also attended by African heads of state and other world leaders.

      The signing officially ended more than 21 years of war that has left at least 2 million people dead, mainly from famine and disease. The conflict between the largely black, Christian and animist South against the Muslim North has displaced up to five million people.

      “We applaud the South and North for signing the peace agreement,” Kenyan Anglican Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi said in Nairobi. “It is our prayer that Sudan will now be peaceful and the people will work together to build their country. We hope the religious groups will also tolerate each other.”

      The accord has eight protocols detailing power and wealth sharing, security and a permanent ceasefire. It also directs how the comprehensive agreement will be implemented.

      “We are very satisfied because it meets the expectation of peace in Southern Sudan,” said the Rev. Paul Yugusuk of the Episcopal Church of Sudan. He added that the agreement would deliver peace based on the Christian ideas of love, forgiveness,reconciliation and unity.

      With the agreement in place, the parliament in Khartoum and the rebel’s Liberation Council will separately adopt it, after which Garang will be made Sudan’s first vice‑president as well as the president of the government of Southern Sudan. Within six months the Sudanese constitution has to be amended to enable the formation of a government of national unity with the rebels.

      Representing the World Council of Churches and the All Africa Conference of Churches at the signing, Bright Mawudor, the AACC director of Finance and Administration, said the two ecumenical bodies would support civil society in implementing the accord.

      The treaties do not deal with the unrelated strife in western Sudan’s Darfur region, where tens of thousands of people have died of malnutrition and disease in the past year and hundreds of thousands made homeless.