Sudan rivals agree way out of north-south crisis

KHARTOUM, Saturday, (AFP)

Sudanese leaders have agreed on a way out of the worst crisis so far in the implementation of a 2005 peace deal that ended the two-decade civil war between north and south, a southern official said on Saturday.

President Omar al-Beshir reached agreement with southern leader Salva Kiir, who is also first vice president, late Friday that all provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement would now be implemented by the end of the year, Luka Piong, a minister in the southern regional government, told reporters.

Southern ministers who quit the national unity government in Khartoum on September 11 in protest at slow progress in implementing the agreement would return to their jobs once the necessary steps had been taken to carry out the new deal, Piong added.

"We want this return (to the government) to be made at a ceremony which will mark the relaunch of implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement," he said.

Beshir and Kiir also endorsed Thursday's recommendation by the Ceasefire Political Committee made up of military commanders from the two sides that northern troops be given a new December 15 deadline to withdraw from the south, Piong said.

The 2005 agreement gave the Sudanese military until July 9 to redeploy but it retains large numbers of troops in the south.

The military says they number only 3,600 but the southern former rebels say they total as many as 17,600. The former rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army also retains around 5,000 troops in the north which are supposed to redeploy to the south under the peace deal.