News Article by PANA posted on December 15, 2000 at 15:51:28: EST (-5 GMT)
Southern Sudanese Minister Resigns
Panafrican News Agency
December 14, 2000
Khartoum, Sudan
Sudan's State Minister of Roads and Communications Taban Deng
has resigned
to protest against government's failure to implement a
peace agreement it
signed with six Southern rebel groups in 1997.
Deng, himself a signatory to the peace accord, said in a letter
of
resignation he faxed to President Omar el Bashir From Nairobi,
Kenya,
that he was resigning "because the government did not
implement, has
marginalised and has ignored the Khartoum Peace
Agreement."
He added that he was also resigning because the government was
directing
all oil revenue towards the army while those funds should
have been spent on
the reconstruction of the oil producing areas in the
south.
Deng blamed the government for supporting factional groups
seceding from
the Democratic Salvation Front the six former rebel
groups had formed to
pursue the agreement's implementation and
rally southerners around it.
News reports Thursday indicated that Deng had joined Riek Machar,
the
front chairman, who resigned at an early stage to protest the delay
in the
implementation of the 1997 peace accord.
He returned to the bush and his forces are fighting the government
troops
in Upper Nile and Equatoria districts in the south.
Deng's resignation is one of series of setbacks the Khartoum peace
accord
had suffered.
Karbino Quanyn, a leading signatory of the accord, was killed in an
ambush
by the SPLA in 1998.
Shortly after that another leading signatory of the accord, Ton Arok
Ton,
was killed in a plane crash in Upper Nile.
The peace accord provides for the right of self- determination to
southern
Sudan, which should be decided in a general referendum in
the area after an
interim period of four years.
In the referendum the southerners can choose between becoming part
of a
united Sudan or form their own country.
The accord also requires the government to do its best to develop
the
civil war-wrecked southern Sudan during the interim period.