August 4th 2018 (Nyamilepedia) – South Sudan’s SPLM-IO under the leadership of the country’s former first vice president Dr. Riek Machar Teny-Dhurgon said on Friday that new groups who were not part of the 2015 ARCISS wants to negotiate a new peace agreement rather than the revitalization of the ARCISS which did not involve them.
Last month, the SPLM-IO and the government of South Sudan decided to sign a peace proposal that was presented by the Sudanese mediation which was rejected by the South Sudan Opposition Alliance and the Former Detainees.
In a exclusive interview with the Nyamilepedia on Friday, the SPLM-IO governor of Imatong state, Nathaniel Pierino, said new groups who were not part of the ARCISS in 2015 want to negotiate a new deal in Khartoum.
“There are new groups who couldn’t see themselves in the ARCISS 2015 they wanted to negotiate a new deal, but we said no,” he told the Nyamilepedia adding that “the High Level Revitalization Forum (HLRF) has so far handled chapters; One; on Governance and Two; on Security arrangements, in Addis Ababa we initialed a number of articles on the two chapters but ten outstanding issues brought us to Khartoum including the number of states.”
On the question of the number of states, Pierino said the government and the SPLM-IO decided to go for an independent border commission after they rejected each other’s proposal over the number of states.
“IG and IO are the only parties that are operationalizing 32 and 21 states in the country respectively. At the talks we rejected the government 32 states they also rejected ours. We later agreed to institute an Inclusive Boundary Committee (IBC) to handle the number of states before Revitalized TGoNU is established,” the statement said.
