US wants world to 'rekindle' passion for southern Sudan peace

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US envoy to Sudan on Wednesday urged the international community to "rekindle" its passion behind a 2005 north-south peace deal in Sudan threatened by renewed violence.

Scott Gration said a test of international commitment to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), signed in the Kenyan town of Naivasha, will come on June 23 when 30 countries and organizations attend a meeting in Washington.

He said China, which has invested billions of dollars in Sudan's budding oil industry and is accused of supplying weapons to Khartoum, will be represented at the meeting by envoy Liu Guijin, whom Gration met last month in Beijing.

The meeting can help "restore that international commitment and to rekindle the passion that we had in Naivasha in 2005," the special US envoy said in his first news briefing in Washington since his appointment in March.

Gration, who has also traveled to Sudan, Qatar and Europe to buttress the CPA and end fighting in the western Darfur region, said "we have a lot of work to do" ahead of a referendum on the south's future in January 2011.

"We have to secure agreements on border demarcations, wealth-sharing, power-sharing," he said. "We have to make sure that all parties are involved to ensure that places like Abyei do not become the next war zone in Sudan."

The contested oil-rich Abyei region along the north-south border lies at the heart of the fragile CPA.

"We've seen an uptick in the violence in the south. It's very difficult at this time to exactly attribute it to (oil and other) resources, but it is very concerning to us," Gration said.

Several rival ethnic groups have clashed in the south in recent months -- violence that southern Sudanese president Salva Kiir, who is also Sudan's vice president, blamed on unnamed outside and internal forces.

The CPA ended a two-decade civil war, the longest in Africa, that claimed 1.5 million lives.

The deal offered the south a six-year transitional period of regional autonomy and participation in a unity government until the 2011 referendum on self-determination.

Abyei will hold also hold a referendum the same year on whether to retain its current special administrative status in the north, or join the south.