CAIRO - Efforts to implement a January peace deal between Khartoum and southern Sudanese rebels moved ahead Wednesday with the arrival of a first contingent of UN peacekeepers, as former belligerents set about drafting a new constitution.
"The first six troops arrived with their equipment last Sunday and another six arrived on Wednesday," George Somerwill of the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) told AFP.
"The deployment is taking place quite slowly," he added in reference to the progressive dispatching of a 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force to support the January agreement that ended more than two decades of civil war.
"Other troops are expected in the next days."
The troops are all Nepali and have taken up position in the city of El-Obeid in central Sudan, he said.
Zimbabwe, Australia, Italy, China and Uganda are among the many countries that have pledged to contribute soldiers and military observers.
The UN Security Council on March 24 approved the deployment of peacekeepers to shore up the north-south peace deal.
The war pitted the mainly Christian and animist south against the Muslim-dominated central government based in the north, killing an estimated 1.5 million people with four million others displaced.
Former warring parties on Saturday formed a committee to draft a new constitution that will clear the way for the formation of a national unity government and mark the beginning of a six-year interim period called for in the January deal.
Government officials, former rebels and other experts will have to hammer out such crucial issues as power and wealth sharing, relations between state and religion, ethnic diversity and self-determination for the south.
The 60-strong National Constitutional Review Commission (NCRC) should have completed its work six weeks after the deal was inked, but progress was held up by squabbling over its composition.
The ruling National Congress party and the former rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) insisted on applying general power-sharing quotas agreed upon in the January deal, which give them 52 percent and 28 percent of the seats respectively, leaving other parties a paltry 20 percent and no power to block decisions.
But at least 10 opposition group, among them the influent Islamist Umma party and the Democratic Unionist Party, have threatened to boycott the constitution drafting, charging that the NCRC was not representative of the country's political landscape.
Khartoum and the SPLM expect the interim constitution to be in place by July when the interim period demanded by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between north and south is due to commence.
A referendum is due to be held on the south's self-determination at the end of the six-year period.
Meanwhile, several pro-government militias have threatened not to disband unless they are included in the peace process and shunned reconciliation talks held between southern factions and the government last week in Kenya.
The January peace deal, which foreign donors this month pledged 4.5 billion dollars to support, did not address the problem of militias or ethnic divisions in the south.
04/27/2005 16:03 GMT