CAIRO, Egypt - Over 19 years of fighting, Sudan has seen truces brokered and broken, accords announced and denounced. Renewed U.S. commitment to ending the civil war and an international atmosphere transformed by Sept. 11 could mean the latest Sudanese agreement will be different.
"There is a chance," Rev. Enock Tombe, head of the Sudan Council of Churches, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Khartoum, Sudan's capital. But "what worries us is whether the parties will implement the agreement, given that previous agreements have not been implemented."
Among many Sudanese, hard hit by a war that pits the Islamic north against the largely Christian and animist south and has resulted in the deaths of 2 million, reaction was equally cautious. As shortwave radios carried word Saturday of a major agreement reached at talks in neighboring Kenya, no one celebrated in a camp near Wau, 850 kilometers (about 500 miles) south of Khartoum, for people displaced by war and related famine.
"When I can go back to my village and come back with cows to sell and continue my education, then that means peace has come, not before. No not before," said camp dweller Wilson Wole, 20.
With Saturday's announcement in Kenya, the government, which had vowed to create an Islamic state after seizing power in 1989, agreed state and religion should be separate. It also said that six years after a full peace agreement was signed, Sudanese in the mainly Christian and animist south would be allowed to vote on whether to remain part of the country.
The government had for years resisted those rebel demands.
John Ashworth, a South Africa-based analyst who works for Sudanese churches, said leaders in Khartoum could be yielding now in hopes peace will open the way to international aid and oil entrepreneurs and help end talk of their extremism — a label they fear could make them targets in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
"They've been looking for international credibility and international respectability," Ashworth said in a telephone interview.
"After Sept. 11, things changed," Tombe agreed.
Sudan's desire to be seen as an ally by the United States gives Washington great influence. Strong U.S. interest in resolving Africa's longest war, fueled in part by U.S. Christian groups who have rallied to the southerners cause, was expressed in the appointment last year of former U.S. Senator John Danforth as special presidential envoy to Sudan.
John Prendergast, a former U.S. diplomat who as co-chair of the Africa Program of the International Crisis Group has closely followed Sudan's war, said the United States is the only mediator to whom both sides will listen. It must remain heavily involved for the Kenyan framework to become a peace agreement, he said in a telephone interview from Washington.
"If we're going to get to an agreement, it's going to be very wrenching for both sides. They have to be pushed and pulled and prodded," Prendergast said.
Hard-liners in Khartoum already have questioned whether the government was offering to give up too much.
"Issues and established facts such as Islamic law, federal rule and unity should not be compromised," Mohammed Hassan al-Amin told The Associated Press Sunday. Al-Amin is an official of the Popular National Congress headed by Hassan Turabi. Turabi, now feuding with President Omar el-Bashir, was the ideologue behind the fundamentalist brand of Islam that is the basis of Sudanese law.
The southerners also have their hard-liners, who hold out hope of wresting independence — or at least a better deal — on the battlefield.
In 1997, the Sudan People's Liberation Army refused to sign an agreement endorsed by the government and smaller rebel groups that gave the south more autonomy and promised an independence referendum after four years. In the months after that April, 1997 agreement was signed, the SPLA captured most of Sudan's southern border with Congo and Uganda and opened a second front along the eastern border with Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The SPLA signed the Kenya agreement that observers like Ashworth and Tombe say gives more clear-cut guarantees their demands will be met.
Government and rebel officials said Saturday that further peace talks next month in Kenya will focus on integrating rebel leaders into the national government and sharing the country's oil wealth. Tombe, of Sudan's Council of Churches, said both sides now must move quickly to remove the remaining hurdles to peace before momentum is lost, and outsiders must continue to play a role.
"The issue of the international community providing guarantees is crucial," he said.