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January 19, 2012 (KHARTOUM) – Sudan and South Sudan on Thursday resumed indirect talks on their oil dispute as Khartoum accused Juba of lacking good faith to reach an agreement.
- FILE - Thabo Mbeki (L), South Sudan’s Salva Kiir and Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir
The talks, mediated by the African Union High Level Panel (AUHIP), were scheduled to commence in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Tuesday.
According to Sudan’s official news agency, SUNA, the head of Sudan’s delegation, Idriss Mohamed Abdul Gadir, and that of South Sudan, Pagan Amum, met with the AUHIP’s member and former Burundian President Pierre Buyoya.
SUNA said the meeting agreed to divide each delegation into three teams to discuss different aspects of the oil dispute.
The recently-separated countries have been deadlocked in a dispute over the transit fees the land-locked South should pay for the use of Sudan’s pipeline infrastructure to export its oil.
South Sudan preempted the talks by reiterating accusations that Sudan was stealing its oil and demanded compensation.
Pagan Amum said that Khartoum “poisoned” the negotiation atmosphere by stealing oil. According to press reports, South Sudan demanded that its northern neighbor pay an equivalent of 1.4 million barrels of oil to resume talks.
On the other hand, Sudan’s negotiating team in Addis Ababa issued Thursday a press release defending its decision to confiscate South Sudan’s oil and blaming the latter’s “rejectionist attitude” for the stalled the talks.
The press release stated that all the proposals put forward by Khartoum to resolve the dispute were met by rejection from South Sudan, suggesting that Juba’s alleged attitude is influenced by external players.
“This rejectionist attitude has been the major reason for the protracted nature of these negotiations” the statement said, adding that southerners are influenced in their choices by “some of their international political sponsors from outside the African continent.
It deplored the use of “slanderous” language such as “stealing, robbery, piracy, theft etc” by south Sudanese official to describe Sudan’s taking of its “entitlements.”
The team accused its southern counterpart of not negotiating in good faith and having no intention to reach an agreement.
It accused Juba of lacking good faith in the negotiations to reach an agreement within a reasonable time.
The Sudanese team claimed Khartoum has not received any payment from Juba to cover the cost of processing and transporting its crude oil since South Sudan’s impendence.
Accordingly, it added, Khartoum has decided to take its entitlements of transit fee and other service fees in kind.
The statement also claimed that Sudan officially informed South Sudan that it would begin confiscating oil on 1, December last year. It went on to argue that this fact negates South Sudan’s allegation that Khartoum was stealing the oil.
(ST)
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