A 'local paper' for those who've never had one

At dusk in this bombed-out town, once a key battlefield in Africa's longest civil war, a keen young reporter for the local paper is grumbling over his bulky laptop.

A deadline looms, but his office - one room in a tin-roof shack filled with the lazy whine of mosquitoes - runs on solar power, and he has just lost his race against sunset.

Jacob Deng Mayom must wait for dawn to finish his story. Friday he will send it by satellite phone from deep in rural Sudan to his editor 1,100 miles to the south in neighboring Kenya.

Mr. Mayom is one of six reporters (three in Sudan, three in Kenya) for a pioneering newspaper distributed twice a month throughout war-ravaged southern Sudan. Originally written in English, the Sudan Mirror celebrated its first anniversary in October by adding an Arabic edition - a small but significant step toward reconciliation in a land marked by acrimony between the Christian south, where English is generally spoken, and the Arab-speaking Muslim north.

"It is a very political statement to bring out the Arabic editions," says publisher Dan Eiffe, former Roman Catholic priest and well-known aid worker who's heavily involved in reconstruction inside Sudan. "It says we want to write an honest, independent newspaper for Sudan," whether readers speak Arabic or English, whether they side with the Islamic government or with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), a mostly Christian rebel army that has clashed with the government in Khartoum since 1983.

In distributing an Arabic newspaper in towns and villages once at the heart of the civil war, the Mirror could anger some of its hoped-for readers. Arabic, after all, is the hated language of the oppressor in the eyes of die-hard anti-Khartoum southerners.

But many southerners were educated in government schools and read only Arabic. The Sudan Mirror may be their only source of information about events in their country, and the newspaper's staff argue that they stand for a new, peaceful Sudan, where news and opinion flow freely, in both languages.

"We try to avoid overt politics," says Mr. Eiffe, "but we wanted to appeal to the idea of a peaceful Sudan where previously marginalized people have access to information they desperately want."

Peace talks between Khartoum and the SPLM have dragged on for two years, and international goodwill and patience are running thin. Chief negotiators in the peace process resumed talks on Monday in Naivasha, Kenya, reiterating promises they made to the UN last month they would have a comprehensive peace agreement ready to sign by New Year's Eve.

Analysts say pinning down peace in the south would provide a blueprint for solving the separate 22-month-old conflict to the west in Darfur. Hopes for peace are high, even among senior observers.

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