|
Turabi Under House Arrest As Sudan Talks To Rebels
KHARTOUM, May 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Sudanese government warmed up to its opposition Wednesday as it moved opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi from jail to house arrest while President Omar al-Bashir was preparing for talks with rebel leaders next week.
Turabi's wife, Wisal al-Mahdi, told news agencies said that her husband was brought late Tuesday from Khartoum's Cooper Prison, where he had spent three months, to a house in Khartoum North's Kafouri neighborhood.
She said four armed police were guarding the house.
Members of the family were allowed to see him "briefly" while she was permitted to stay with him in the house.
Wisal al-Mahdi said her husband, who is 69, "is in good health, thanks to Allah."
Turabi, and three other officials of his Popular National Congress (PNC), were arrested February 21st, two days after the party signed a memorandum of understanding with the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), at war with successive Khartoum governments since 1983.
The memorandum called for "an escalation in popular and pacific resistance, to bring the regime to abandon its totalitarian policy," news agencies said.
Turabi helped Sudan's Beshir seize power in a 1989 coup, but the two developed a rivalry that came to a head in December 1999 when Beshir dissolved parliament and declared a state of emergency. The move was aimed at ousting Turabi as parliamentary speaker at a time when he was backing legislation to curb presidential powers.
In May last year, Turabi was sacked as secretary general of the ruling National Congress, and founded his own PNC.
Meanwhile, news agencies reported that el-Bashir and SPLA leader John Garang would attend a regional peace summit aimed at ending the country's 18-year war which started after the mainly Christian south began a military campaign for independence from the main, mostly Muslim-Arab, country.
The summit to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday, is being organized by the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and will be the first time the two have attended the same peace talks since 1997, according to an official of the SPLA.
A Kenyan foreign ministry official said the leaders of development authority members - Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti - were expected to attend.
The latest stage of the war in Sudan broke out in 1983 and has claimed an estimated two million lives, mostly the result of famine.
The SPLA is the largest of several Christian and animist armed groups fighting for greater autonomy for south Sudan's Christian population. The groups also often clash with each other.
Garang did not sign a Peace Agreement in Khartoum on April 21, 1997, and is currently warring against Khartoum, assisted by the governments of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda.
Meanwhile, Sudan's foreign minister welcomed U.S. signals of greater involvement in ending the civil war, but urged Washington to stay neutral in the conflict.
"What we are looking for is a neutral and fair involvement,'' Sudan's Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said at the start of a two-day visit to Oslo, Norway.
During a weekend visit to Kenya, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced Sunday that the United States will soon work hard with all parties in the area to bring a ceasefire into effect, if possible, to end the 18 year civil war, news agencies said.
The U.S. secretary told a news conference after talks in Kenya with humanitarian groups working in Sudan that the United States will work to achieve "peaceful reconciliation" between the sides in a war that has produced "so much distress" throughout Central and East Africa.
Political analysts say this will be the first U.S. intervention the administration of George W. Bush has initiated to help solve an internal conflict within another country, partly in response to U.S. congressional pressure to aid Christians in the south of Sudan.
According to U.S. officials a new special envoy to Sudan is expected to be announced soon.
|
