Thank you Mr. Chairman. As a matter of fact the paper presented by Dr. Francis Deng is appreciated by all of us. He talked about things that divide us being the things which are not said. In fact we have been saying these things. Not in a meeting, an organized meeting like this. But they have been said. We have been saying them in the Assembly, we have been saying them in political rallies. But it is good that people sit and talk about them. What worries me is that after we talk about them, what will we achieve? Because you must convince somebody that these things which are not said, are true, and there must be a solution to them. I have also mixed feeling about this meeting. I was happy when I was invited, but I had another mixed feeling because this is my first time to come out and meet with our brothers who are in the SPLA/SPLM. The mixed feeling is that brother Eliaba [Eliaba Surur], who used the joke that he has a lot of signatures, he has a lot of agreements which he signed outside and brought them, and nothing has materialized. I, being inside has a lot of agreements we signed with the Prime Minister and nothing materializes. So we used to joke that I was the one who signed things inside and he is the one who signs things outside. So my mixed feelings is now that I will be entering into signatures also outside. Because inside my position will be really very difficult. And it leads me to the question raised by brother Dr. Francis Deng. We have the crisis of the leadership. How can we here, representing the various parties, influence our leadership? After we agree here, will what we sign here, will what I sign on behalf of my party, will I be able to convince the leadership inside? Brothers here have been bringing what I referred to as things signed, and some of you might have been in Khartoum when the retired General Yusuf [Yusuf Ahmed Yusuf] came with Sayyed Mohamed Osman [al Mirghani] from Addis Ababa. The reception given to them was tremendous, and anybody who did not have the experience of the Sudanese politics thought that day that everything was over. And even the very people who gave their support on the spot in the airport, the next day they said different things, beginning from the top to the lower strata. And that is why I am saying: if we say all these things here in this meeting today, will we really be able, my friends who go back, all of us who go back to Khartoum, will we stick to what we agree on? This is my worry. Because it will be signing something which will just increase the number of agreements we have reached, and it will be an embarrassment to me and an embarrassment to the hosts who would have been wasting time. There is nothing we did not say. Only that we may not have said them in a forum like this. Many things which we are saying here have been said. If you look into all the agreements before us here, and this maybe only one-tenth of what we have signed, some of the documents you have here are just a very little portion of what we have agreed on among ourselves, the Sudanese, but people have not changed positions. Again this crisis of leadership in the example of the DUP/SPLA agreement. When it was brought into the Assembly by the government, it actually failed to endorse it in the Council of Ministers which was requested in the text. It was brought to the Assembly, not as an agreement to be endorsed but in a different form. To dedicate the powers to the Prime Minister, not the government, to carry out the agreements of the DUP/SPLA. We in the African opposition said no! The motion to be moved in the Assembly should be that the constituent Assembly endorses the peace agreement signed between the DUP/SPLA in Addis Ababa on the 16. of November 1988. This was our motion in the African opposition. Our brothers, who are very sensitive about the mention of SPLA/SPLM, and many people do not want it because it will be a recognition, felt and advised that the word SPLA should be left out. Well, the DUP came up with what was a compromise motion. That we support the statement of the Prime Minister and that the agreement should be accepted without mentioning names. Some of our brothers who were in the government, mainly from the Umma Party, the Prime Minister's party, came to us and asked us to support the DUP compromise motion. If we did this, according to them, we will all agree. So I as the leader of the parliamentary opposition went and withdrew our motion. And we all agreed on the DUP compromise motion to accept the peace initiative. What happened the following day? The very people who were negotiating, who had asked us from the Umma Party to come to this compromise were influenced by another front, that actually held the position that there was nothing at all to be supported, there was no question of support. And three days people had been moving to convince themselves, but when it came to the zero hour even the very people who had asked us from the Umma Party to go and come to this compromise just went in and said, let everything be settled by voting. So we went in and voted the whole thing out. They voted for the failure of the motion which was a compromise. I am saying this because even if we agree, and I stand to be corrected, maybe things will change, but if we agree here there are parties where even 99% of people support the thing and then 1% come to say, no, then things will change. And this is where I have the mixed feelings. It is not always to state the position. If a party delegates a member to come to this kind of conference, that person should be delegated and whatever he does, he should at least be respected. At the Koka Dam they said those people who went to sign the Koka Dam agreement were not delegated by the party. It is ridiculous. So I hope we who have been delegated here to this honourable place, let us seriously think of the situation in which we left our people in the country. The outcome, I don't know what it will be, the outcome of what we agree upon, we should be seen to respect it. This is the credibility, actually the word I should use is the credibility of the leadership. We sign here, I would not like to give you a lot of examples, but I who has been signing inside has discovered that when I sign something here in this room, something else is being signed next door, and it is the one which is signed in the next room which will prevail tomorrow.
And all the efforts that have been put into that exercise. This is how we spent three years in the Constituent Assembly saying that we want peace, and coming to agreement, and the agreements are not carried out. The other problem is the consensus. The Prime Minister or the government has been talking of achieving or trying to achieve the consensus of the internal front, i.e. the people inside should at least reach a consensus of how to talk to the SPLA. In fact one thing we failed to convince our brothers inside about, is that when we tell them that, although the SPLA, the majority, are southerners, the way they look at us, is just the same way they look at you. They consider us people inside, and they are a different people. In fact we should be talking to them together with the people inside. But some of us use the words, we are considered as fifth columnists inside, or the remote control people inside. These are the words which are used about us, that we are actually the eyes of the SPLA inside. So the consensus the government has been about cannot be 100%. We have been telling the Prime Minister that, if we are looking for a consensus of 100% we will not get it at all. We tried it on several occasions, but I will give you the example in the document here. He talks of finding alternatives to the legal system. There was a committee formed to see how we can bring alternative laws which can replace the September Laws brought in by the dictator Nimeiri and to manage things until we go into the constitutional conference. The people who were chosen in that committee came out with the unanimous opinion that the five laws which were agreed upon, except the one which is the Islamic punishment, hudud, should be put aside and left for discussion. If we can reach agreement before the constitutional conference, good, if we don't we can take it to the constitutional conference. These five laws were blessed by the Prime Mininster and by everybody. But after we made the ceremony, of letting it be blessed in the Parliament the following day, everything changed and we went back again. There was the consensus charter, the last by the one government of the Prime Minister, there was a charter in which there were 37 points - 37 points of differences. We agreed on 36 points and differed only on one point, that is the Islamic law of hudud punishment which, we said, we should sign it on a separate sheet because this point needs to be debated in the constitutional conference. But the 36 letters of the consensus, about these, you may have heard it from the government, we signed them, while the Islamic Front refused. After we made the ceremony of signature the following day, the Islamic Front succeeded and the whole agreement was brought down. And, as a result, we went into the opposition. Now, the DUP/SPLA-agreement, which the last speaker talked about, was agreed by everybody except the Islamic Front. People said, OK this is fine. The Prime Minister agreed and the parties in the government agreed. While we were about to bless it, the government changed its mind and the Islamic Front succeeded. It was turned down on the grounds that there was no consensus. In other words the consensus in the mind of the government is that if the Islamic Front agrees, then there is a consensus, if they refuse there is no consensus. So, it is left now for us to see whether we can really achieve consensus in the Sudan. But for me, and from the few examples I have given, I do not have much hope. I am glad that brother Joseph Modistu has asked the Islamic Front, they are actually rivals in our politics, he has asked these people to look at things at the level of the country. I hope they will compromise, and I hope we will also compromise on something, because when we are saying that, let us discuss the issue of religion, the issue of sharing power, the issue of identity, all this, let us discuss them in the constitutional conference. And whatever promises requested by the SPLA, that should not be put as if we are involved. This is a condition put by people who are taking up arms. Another thing is that SPLA has come down to a compromise which could be acceptable and could allow people to go for the constitutional conference. So I hope that in this meeting, even if we don't come out of it with something signed, we could still take seriously the fact that the crisis about which we are talking here is mounting as confidence is being lost. In fact, in the last government, when the government was being reshuffled, I was one of the people who refused to be consulted, because I became fed up of contact whose results will not be useful, and I was happy that the government was formed without me. So you can see these days, in which even we who are politicians, trained to talk, and we should talk even if we know it is useless, have reached a point in which we do not want to talk again. And you think that maybe God will come with a solution.
Then there is the question of peace and food. Some of us in the opposition have been telling the government that it is useless to talk about food, because even if people say that food is going to the south, it will not go. Sometimes it goes, but it will not go to the right people. That is why we think that concentration should be on peace. Because if you bring about peace, food will go. This is how we differed with some of the southerners who are in the government, some of the Southerners who have been said before here that they have not been brought, and, I am sorry, that was an oversight. Because they talk of relief, whereas we talk of peace. The reason we talk about peace is that peace can be the solution to all the things we are talking about. They talk about relief because, being in the government they will be handling the relief, this is why they talk about relief. This is the difference. They want peace, but they don't want it now. So, I myself, I am not very serious about relief although I know many people have died. I think that talking about relief we can not reach things. We have to put the priorities. If the priority is peace, then let us bring about peace. If there is peace, everybody will get food. Because the South is a place full of rain. If there is peace today, after three months, when people are settled, there will come rain and everybody will have plenty for each other. This is why we think peace should be the priority. But if you want to talk about relief, it means you want the war to continue, and you want to make life difficult for people who will work with the relief, because there are people now committed that they must carry relief to the people under any circumstances. That is good. They are making sacrifice. But to stop all these things our concentration should be on peace and not relief.
I would sum up by saying that this meeting is useful to me since we talk about things that have not been talked about. But I will also think that in a situation where people have had certain things agreed upon, we should start to examine the DUP/SPLA agreement - how did it fail? is it completely rejected? can it be improved upon? - rather than try to revise the whole agreement, rather than try to solve all our problems. We have something in hand which every Sudanese, at least the majority of Sudanese, has appreciated. That is the last agreement of the DUP/SPLA. I hope that we here, with all our differences on that agreement, should try to examine it. We take it as a point of departure, that we start on it and we examine whether we can approve on it, or we say we reject it and we need a new agreement. Because the problem of the DUP/SPLA agreement, as I have been told by some of the close friends of mine in the government, they said, the agreement is good. But because it is brought by the DUP it will boost their position. It will boost their positions and thereby, in the next elections they will improve their position. I hope this is not the opinion of everybody in the government. But our feelings stalled when the government said peace is not only a duty of the government, it is the duty of everybody, every Sudanese, whether in opposition, or in the government, or being an independent like brother Diriage, peace is the job to be carried out by everybody. This was the position of the government, and we were happy. But of late, some brothers went to Ethiopia, they had a workshop. When they came back, they were investigated and they were told that what they did was against the security of the country. Whereas what we knew was that they were talking about peace. I hope what we are doing here will not be taken in that line.
So, to sum up, I am actually suggesting that we look at the last agreement of the DUP and see what are the problems within it. Should we approve on it, or do we start another agreement to add to all the agreements we have. Do we do that? But I for one think that we should look at the last agreement to see if we can improve it, or even if we can convince ourselves about it, it will make our job easier. Thank you.
