Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Allow me to express my grateful thanks to the organizers of this meeting, and doing this I must refer to the warm and wonderful reception and for facilitating the smooth conduct of this dialogue and discussion which I hope will reflect in a frank and fruitful discussion. Well, in fact it is the first time such a meeting is held although so many meetings were held in different places, it is the first time that the meeting involves all the parties. And we have here all the parties, and we have the government, the opposition and other concerned personalities of the Sudanese and the good audience which is here. All the meetings that in fact took place were in most cases between two parties or three, like what happened in Koka Dam. I was planning to speak a lot about the DUP initiative, but my friend Joseph [Joseph Okel Abango] said all the good things and I can't say better things about the initiative of the DUP. So I will not refer to it, except in the last paragraph. I have one particular thing which I want to cover later on.
As I said, all the meetings that took place were between the two parties and they all held a good pace or they paved the road for the solution of the problem of the Sudan. That is the need for a national constitutional conference which all of us hope that will solve our problems. Dr. Francis Deng also referred to this hope. He said that he is afraid that we all reach the national constitutional conference and everybody is hoping that it will solve our problems, and then it doesn't. We are also afraid that we reach it and we may not agree, and that will be one of the possibilities, but the most important thing is that we reach the conference so that we can sit and discuss our problems. The first thing is that reaching the national constitutional conference in itself, for me at least, is a very big achievement because it will stop the war. It means that when we reach it we will have ceasefire. This is a very important thing for us who know war because we also know what it means. The war in our country is really a bloody war, a dirty war, a war between brothers that are killing each other and there is quite a big number of innocent people that have died every day in hundreds and tens. There is endlessly many deaths in our country. And it could be stopped if we worked hard all of us so that we can reach the ultimate goal, which is the national constitutional conference and that means we reach the cease-fire.
I have said I will refer later on to the DUP and SPLA peace initiative. I would like to say that the agreement between the two parties, between the DUP and SPLA, was reached after a long and frank discussion, based on each side's understanding and confidence between the two parties, the very thing which is lacking, in fact, between SPLA/SPLM and most of the parties inside the country. But, thank God, that confidence was there. So we reached that agreement, which I think was good, and so many people in the country or outside also think that it was good. But unfortunately they did not go. I see that my friend Ali el Haj when he commented about this he tried to slightly blame our friends in SPLA that they signed an agreement with a sectarian, referring to Sayyed Mohamed Osman al Mirghani being a religious leader as patron of our party the DUP. I don't want to talk about the party and say it is a national party and this and that, but anyway, the decision and all the work inside that party was definitely democratic and that agreement was not at all negotiated by Sayyed Mohamed Osman. It was negotiated by others. For quite a long time I was among them, Dr. Lam Akol was among them, and we reached that agreement. But when we came to the signature, as he is the patron of the party, we took him to give the blessing. But he was not the force behind it and he didn't do anything until it was done by the leadership of the party. And I could throw the ball to Ali El Haj and say you are also doing the same thing with another party, which is the Umma party. Why are you blaming those who did that?
Anyway, I could conclude from this and say it is my hope, my personal concern and personal hope that we have been building a strong united Sudan which will emerge stable and be part of the stability in the area. So in this we have to work all of us closely, and a lot of work has to be done. And whether we try to reach an agreement between us to endorse this initiative or to reach any other agreement I hope that all our efforts are needed in this respect and we cannot find a better gathering than this. I tried to work in this field, or I have been involved in this field since the uprising in 1985 up to this moment and I think this is the best chance. And I therefore thank our friends here that they gave us this opportunity and I hope with a little bit of effort we can make it fruitful and we can take something back to our people and we can work towards stopping this war which has been a bloody war. It seems that, unfortunately, most of our politicians, when they are handling this problem in Khartoum they are not in the full picture of what is going on in the field, in the area where the war is. But being a military man who served in the same area, who knows the people on both sides, not only knowing them by the name, especially those senior officers, and knowing the innocent people who are unnecessarily losing their lives in the area, for a man who served in that area for more than 10 years, who knows every bit of the terms of the people there, I really hope that all of you may try to make this opportunity, this chance, a useful one and a fruitful one which we can take as a gift for our people in the Sudan so that we feel that we did something. And I assure you, if we reach something every one of you will leave from here proud that it is for the good of the country. Thank you very much.
