WASHINGTON DC, January 7, 2009 (Gutong) – The President of South Sudan and the First Vice President of the Republic of the Sudan, Salva Kiir, has ended his visit to Washington with a briefing to Sudanese immigrants living in the area.
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Kiir and his delegation comprising of Dr. Cirino Hiteng, Comrade Malik Agaar, Comrade Nhial Deng Nhial, Dr. Pauline Riak, among others, met South Sudanese immigrants living in the Washington DC metropolitan area.
President Kiir briefed the Sudanese nationals on the mission of his visit. According to reports made available since he was tracked right from Juba, Kiir came to Washington basically to pay a valuable and meaningful tribute, gratitude, and special thanks on behalf of Sudanese in general to the United States’ outgoing President, President George Walker Bush for his role in bringing peace to Sudan. President Bush signed into law the Sudan Peace Act in 2002 and it was this Act, along with many other factors including consistent cooperation from the Kenyan government that ended the Sudan’s generational and deadly civil conflict.
President Kiir disclosed that he and his delegation had many other agenda on their list to discuss with the President of the United States of America. Kiir and his team wanted to inform the American people along with their incoming President, Barrack Obama, who will be inaugurated on January 20th, that South Sudan’s young government and its people still needed support from America. He disclosed to the Sudanese he met that he had discussed with the American leaders the SPLM position on peace initiative in Darfur.
President Kiir said that he had briefed the American leaders on the status of the Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The Bush administration helped the former Sudanese foes to engineer the CPA in 2005. It was this Comprehensive Peace Agreement that engendered current partnership between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and north Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP).
President Kiir further noted the details of the challenges facing the implementation of the CPA. On that note, he talked about a number of issues including; the recent population census conducted in Sudan, the need to scale up the United Nations peace keeping mission in Sudan, the border demarcation between the north and south of Sudan, the security situation in South Sudan as well as the oil resource and how its proceedings are being shared between the north and south.
After the briefing, President Kiir took questions from the audience, which he answered comprehensively while steering away from politics. In his characteristic call, President Kiir asked skilled South Sudanese to return home and help reconstruct the war-ravaged communities.
However, many Sudanese nationals in the Diaspora have always countered the President’s appeals to return home with questions like “where and how does a skilled returnee from the west begin in South Sudan and “how do you quit your job in the United States, for example, to respond to the President’s call only to end up jobless and hungry in South Sudan?”.