CAR Peace Deal to Be Unveiled at Next Week's AU Summit After Being Fully Signed - Ministry
The peace agreement reached between the authorities and armed groups of the Central African Republic (CAR) will be unveiled at the African Union (AU) summit in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa next week, after being appended by the missing signatures of several parties involved, the CAR ministry for communications and media announced on Thursday
On Tuesday, CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadera and leaders of 14 armed groups initiated the peace agreement at talks in Khartoum. On Wednesday, the deal was finalized and inked in the CAR capital of Bangui by the participants in the talks.
"The negotiations in Khartoum were not secret. The deal could not be secret either then. The agreement has not yet been published for the formal reasons mostly, because several signatures are missing, which will be appended in Addis Ababa during the summit of the African Union in the upcoming days [February 10-11]. After that the deal will be unveiled in all the details," the ministry said in a statement.
According to the statement, there has been "a lot of falsehood" around the peace agreement, even though it does not contain any "dishonest compromise or any anti-constitutional elements."
"This agreement has been negotiated in a way to be a balanced deal allowing the return of peace as wanted by the central Africans. It includes ... restraint mechanisms for the implementation of this deal by all the signing parties," the ministry stressed.
The statement, however, noted that the provisions related to justice and power sharing were considered by the government to be of greatest concern.
"As for power sharing, it was admitted by everyone in Khartoum that the institutions are already open to armed groups which make part of the government, the President's and Prime minister's offices," it clarified.
Finally, the ministry also announced a creation of a "Truth, Justice, Reparation and Reconciliation Commission" to examine the civil suits related to the years-long armed conflict.
CAR has been suffering from sectarian clashes between the Muslims and Christians since the 2013 coup, when the Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the nation, overthrowing then-President Francois Bozize and provoking a backlash from the Christian Anti-Balaka militia. On January 24 of this year, the CAR government for the first time engaged in AU-brokered direct talks with the country's opposition groups.
On February 2, it became known that the conflicting sides agreed to establish a mixed border security mechanism between the CAR government, UN troops and representatives of the armed groups. It was also decided that a special commission tasked with accounting all the crimes committed in the country since 2013 would be set up.