UN Security Council prods Sudan and South Sudan back to talks

Now, with both the United Nations and the African Union pushing the two countries to get back to mediation, diplomats hope they are creating the chance for Sudan and South Sudan to cool off and give peace yet another chance.

South Sudan Minister for Government Affairs Deng Alor Kuol told journalists at the UN on Tuesday that Juba was ready to abide by the UN resolution.

“If we reach an agreement, we will continue to export our oil through Port Sudan,” Bloomberg news agency quoted Mr. Kuol as saying, referring to the northern Sudan port on the Red Sea. “At the same time, we will continue to look at building alternative pipelines.”

If South Sudan sounds a bit bold, that’s because it ended up keeping some three-quarters of the once-united Sudan’s total oil output of 490,000 barrels a day.

The Sudanese government in Khartoum, which once paid for its large military and its large bureaucratic and intelligence apparatus through oil revenues became a largely agricultural country again in mid-2011, and is facing a mounting fiscal crisis. South Sudan, meanwhile, became one of Africa’s largest oil-producing nations but with almost no expertise for how to manage those proceeds, and no means for getting its oil to market, except through the territory of its former enemy, with which it fought a 20-year-long civil war.

Sudan, for its part, has been eager to get what little is left of its oil industry back up and running. On Wednesday, Sudanese Petroleum Minister Awad Ahmed al-Jaz told reporters at Heglig that Sudan had resumed oil production at the Heglig oil field, which once produced 55,000 barrels a day, almost half of Sudan’s total 115,000 barrels per day production.

"This oilfield was producing 55,000 barrels per day," Mr. al-Jaz said at the oilfield. "Now as we said ... we plan to produce more than that, besides the production of other oilfields which will follow."

Khartoum may have difficulty increasing production, however, since most of the country’s remaining oilfields are in its southern states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan, both of which have full-blown domestic insurgencies that have tied down the Sudanese Armed Forces and threatened economic installations such as oil-pumping stations.

Previous

1 | 2