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Sudan

Opposition Leader Predicts Solution To Sudan's Conflict

Ali Dellali, PANA Correspondent
TRIPOLI, Libya (PANA) - The chairman of Sudan's opposition Umma party, Sadek el-Mahdi, has predicted an imminent political solution to the conflict in the country.

He said it is impossible to find a solution to the Sudanese conflict through military means or partitioning the country.

"Those who want or talk about self determination are actually venting their dissatisfaction with the current political situation," he told PANA.

"Sudan is one single entity from north to South...Today more than ever before we believe in a political settlement to the crisis," he emphasised.

However, Mahdi expressed the belief that if injustice and unfairness are not eliminated, and if the southerners' claims are not satisfied, "they will seek self determination and undermine the unity of the country."

According to him, the causes of the Sudanese civil war are to be sought in the hard Islamic inclinations of the ruling regime in Khartoum.

"Sudan is a microcosm of Africa where all the Arab-African diversity of the continent can be found," Mahdi observed.

"A political solution to the Sudanese crisis should necessarily take into account the cultural diversity of the country, where people with different beliefs, religions, customs and cultures, live together," he explained. "To my mind, there should be peaceful co-existence among the cultures and religions of Sudan in order for the crisis to be solved."

Mahdi also hinted that the government and most leaders in the Sudanese opposition were favourable to a political solution to the crisis.

He said that "is meant to definitively remove all the causes of the civil war by giving priority to cultural diversity in the country."

Such political solution could be negotiated within the framework of the joint initiative undertaken by Egypt and Libya for a settlement of the conflict.

"The initiative is the only one available to us," he noted, adding that some quarters tend to misrepresent it by saying that it is favourable to the Arab and Moslem populations in the north and detrimental to the Christian and animist blacks in the south.

"The political solution projected is actually one that recognises cultural diversity in Sudan, removes all causes of civil war and introduces democratic changes in the country," he pointed out.

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