ADDIS ABABA: South Sudan’s warring leaders failed to reach a deal to end more than a year of civil war, mediators said on Friday, with the latest collapse in peace talks paving the way for possible sanctions.

Ethiopia’s prime minister said South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar missed a deadline to reach a peace agreement by midnight Thursday, and that further talks on Friday “did not produce the necessary breakthrough”. “This is unacceptable, both morally and politically,” Hailemariam Desalegn said in the statement issued by the east African regional bloc IGAD, which has been trying to mediate a peace deal.

Hailemariam also gave IGAD’s harshest criticism yet of Kiir and his former deputy Machar, whose personal feud has exploded into ethnic massacres, gang rapes and the forced displacement of civilians, pushing the country to the brink of famine.

“Continuing a war flagrantly disregards the interests of you, the people,” he said, addressing the people of South Sudan, whose country only gained independence from Khartoum in 2011 after a long, bitter war.

Meanwhile, a draft African Union report on the civil war has said South Sudan should be handed over to internationally-mandated caretakers and its warring leaders barred from politics.

The draft report of the AU Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan accuses President Salva Kiir and rebel Riek Machar of direct responsibility for the country’s toxic politics and the war that followed.

Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo led the commission and submitted a final version of the report in January, but it was shelved by AU officials who feared its publication might undermine peace talks. Blame for the conflict has not only been reserved for South Sudan’s leaders.

Regional African governments and the international community -- in particular Britain, Norway and the US, together known as the troika – have also been criticised for helping formulate a flawed 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north-south civil war but enthroned the rebel army as southern leaders.

Published in Dawn March 7th , 2015

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