 |
| UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon [FILE PHOTO] [Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider] |
New York: United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has welcomed the deal reached by the Governments of Sudan and South Sudan on oil and financial arrangements, according to his spokesperson.
In a statement read by Martin Nesirky, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General, Ban said the deal reached was "an important milestone for building good neighbourly relations between the two states."
According to media reports, the two countries reached agreement this past weekend on how much South Sudan will pay to transport its crude oil through Sudan's pipelines. South Sudan's oil output had been shutdown earlier this year due to differences over payment rates.
In his statement, the spokesperson noted that the Secretary-General, however, regrets that the two sides have not met the 2 August deadline set by the Security Council in endorsing the Roadmap put forward in a communiqué from the African Union's Peace and Security Council at a ministerial meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in April.
The Roadmap, for implementation by both Sudan and South Sudan, aims to ease tensions, facilitate the resumption of negotiations on post-secession relations and normalize the relations between the two countries.
South Sudan became independent from Sudan in July last year, six years after the signing of the peace agreement that ended decades of warfare between the north and the south.
However, the peace between the two countries has been threatened over recent months by armed clashes along their common border and outstanding post-independence issues that have yet to be resolved.
In the same statement, the spokesperson said that Secretary-General Ban commends the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) for signing, separately, the so-called Tripartite Memoranda of Understanding – with the African Union, League of Arab States and the United Nations – on humanitarian assistance to war-affected civilians in the Sudanese states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile.
The two Sudanese states, which lie on the border with South Sudan, have been beset by fighting between Sudanese forces and the SPLM-N since last year. The SPLM-N was previously part of the rebel movement that fought for the independence of South Sudan.
- UNifeed