News Analysis: South Sudan negotiation failure may lead to military escalation

After the announcement of failure of the most recent round of talks between the South Sudanese rivals, analysts expressed concern that the negotiation failure could lead to a full military escalation in the new-born state.

On Friday, Ethiopian Prime Minister and chief mediator of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Hailemariam Desalegn announced that the warring parties in South Sudan have failed to reach a deal to end the violence which erupted since mid-December 2013.

He said in a statement that the talks did not produce the necessary breakthrough, describing the two parties' failure as "unacceptable, both morally and politically."

In a first reaction from South Sudan, Juba refused to regard what happened in Addis Ababa as a failure.

"The negotiations have not failed. What happened is that we did not agree on some items," South Sudan's information minister Michael Makuei told Xinhua from Juba Saturday.

Makuei held the rebels responsible for the stalemate of the talks, saying that "they have proposed items that cannot be accepted. We, as a responsible government, cannot accept existence of two armies during the transitional period. This is the essence of the difference."

Meanwhile, Diu Matuk, spokesman of South Sudan rebels' negotiating team, was quoted by local South Sudanese media as saying that they have not presented unachievable demands, noting that the other party rejected all what was proposed.

Analysts believed that the failure of the negotiations between the South Sudanese warring parties may lead to full military confrontation.

"Definitely, the failure of the political course would push the two parties to try to end the matter militarily. We fear that escalation of military operations may come in the near future," Edward Benjamin, a South Sudanese political analyst, told Xinhua.

"Each party will try to strengthen its position in the negotiations if the IGAD decided to resume the talks at any time. This had repeatedly happened after the end of each round of the previous talks," he said.

However, South Sudan's information minister reiterated that "there are clear orders to our forces to commit to the ceasefire agreement and not to initiate any military action except for in self-defence."

The major difference between the two warring sides is that Juba rejects the rebels' proposal that two armies in South Sudan should merge after the general elections, which are scheduled 30 months after signing a peace deal.

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir Mayardit has been in direct talks with the rebel leader Riek Machar since Tuesday in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, in a bid to reach an agreement to end the armed conflict in South Sudan.

Kiir and Machar signed an agreement on Feb. 2, stipulating a cease-fire, power sharing and formation of an interim government prior to reaching a comprehensive prospect for ending the conflict.

The agreement, unlike previous ones, included detailed suggestions on power sharing, in which Kiir should be the president and Machar the vice president, provided that a second vice president is to be named from the Equatoria areas.

South Sudan plunged into violence in December 2013, when fighting erupted between troops loyal to President Kiir and defectors led by his former deputy Machar.

The conflict soon turned into an all-out war, with the violence taking on an ethnic dimension that pitted the president's Dinka tribe against Machar's Nuer ethnic group.

The clashes have left thousands of South Sudanese dead and forced around 1.9 million people to flee their homes. Endit