South Sudan Is Committed To '05 Deal, Leader Says

JUBA, Sudan, Nov. 19 -- Southern Sudan's leader returned Monday from the white marble of Washington to this restless, straw-hut and dirt-road provincial capital, where a crowd welcomed him with cheers and banners, including one that read, "Welcome back from Heroic trip to U.S., Mr. President!"

In a homecoming speech, Salva Kiir Mayardit, president of semiautonomous southern Sudan, told the crowd that the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement, formerly a rebel force, would "never, ever take people to war again." The party, he said, remains committed to a 2005 peace accord that ended a 20-year civil war between the south and the Sudanese government in Khartoum.

"However," Kiir said to a smattering of cheers, "we reserve the right to self-defense should we be attacked."

Kiir, also a vice president of Sudan, traveled to Washington at a time when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, considered a foreign policy trophy for the Bush administration, has been faltering badly and world attention remains focused on the Darfur region to the west. Last month, several southern ministers walked out of a power-sharing government established by the peace deal, protesting what they say is Khartoum's deliberate failure to implement its terms.

Then in a speech over the weekend, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir stoked the crisis by calling on militia forces that fought against the south and stand accused of human rights abuses in Darfur to "open training camps and to gather mujaheddin not for the sake of war but to be ready for anything."

The peace agreement between Khartoum and oil-rich southern Sudan ended Africa's longest civil war. An estimated 2 million people died in the struggle, which was fueled by the same sort of power-sharing grievances and racial tensions that have characterized the conflict in Darfur and lesser-known struggles in eastern and northern Sudan.

Particularly in the United States, the war galvanized Christian evangelical groups who cast it as a war of religious persecution by an Arab and Muslim government against a population that tends to practice indigenous religions and Christianity.

The Bush administration invested heavily in the 2005 peace deal, which was struck as the situation was unraveling in Darfur, where the Sudanese government and its allied militias have waged a brutal campaign against rebels.

Analysts describe the success of the north-south deal as crucial to any future settlement in Darfur, because it contains power-sharing models that could be replicated and because Darfur rebels see it as a litmus test of whether Khartoum can abide by its commitments.

But in recent months, the government of the semiautonomous south has complained more vociferously that Khartoum is thwarting the peace deal by shortchanging it on oil revenue, failing to disarm militias and undermining the work of commissions set up to decide north-south borders.

On Monday, Kiir said little about his Friday meeting with President Bush, but called on the United States and other international players to "keep your eyes on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement" and apply more pressure to ensure it is implemented.

Then a brass band of aging, red-coated former rebels struck up an anthem, and people waved flags tied to bamboo stalks or flailed faded photographs of Kiir and southern Sudan's national hero, rebel leader John Garang, who was killed in a plane crash in July 2005.

Besides problems with the north, Kiir also faces the challenge of demonstrating to southerners that keeping the peace is worth it. After the ceremony, the crowd dispersed to discuss such issues under the shade of low trees.

Monica Keji, 28, said that she and fellow government workers get paid only sporadically, sometimes once every three months. She noted that many schools have yet to be built, and roads remain in disrepair across Juba, a frontier town that is a dusty construction site of mud huts, cranes, bulldozers and occasional herds of big-horned cattle.

For now, though, Keji blames sluggish overall development on the government in Khartoum, which she accuses of cheating southerners out of oil revenue.

"Khartoum is for war, and our leader is for peace," said Keji, who said she lost more relatives in the civil war than she could readily count.