August 31, 2020 -The Sudanese government and the armed movements have signed a peace agreement in initials, in Juba, in the presence of the President of the State of South Sudan, Lieutenant General Salva Kiir
Mayardit, the Chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council in Sudan, Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and the Sudanese Prime Minister, Dr. Abdullah Hamdok.
After years of bloodshed, the country’s transitional government reached an agreement with most but not all of the groups fighting in Darfur and elsewhere.
It was the first major breakthrough in a peace process that started soon after the ouster of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the longtime Sudanese dictator accused of atrocities in Darfur that earned him an indictment
on genocide charges in an international court.
The agreement addresses issues of power and wealth sharing, humanitarian issues, security arrangements, the duration of the transitional period, and the mechanism for the participation of armed
movements in all government institutions.
The agreement includes most of the armed movements in the country, most notably the SPLM-N led by Malik Agar, the Justice and Equality Movement led by Gabriel Ibrahim, and the Sudan Liberation Movement led by Mona Arko Minawi.
After Mr. al-Bashir was ousted in April 2019, a joint military-civilian government promised to bring both democracy and peace. But with violence and massacres in Darfur being reported as
recently as July, there was concern that promises of peace would once again fall short and the nation would descend into a familiar cycle of bloodshed.