By Mary Poni
The First Vice President, Dr. Riek Machar Teny yesterday pledged that the rampant insecurity issues in the country that everyone is not comfortable with will come to an end very soon.
He made the assurance during the commemoration of the International Day of Peace in Juba under the theme; “End Ethnic Discrimination, Build Peace in Diversity.”
“Once we finish the graduation process, we will be able to redeploy the unified forces to calm the inter-communal violence in the country,” he said.
“By September 2023, the issues raised today should not be raised at all because by that time we would have implemented the agreement fully and let our challenge be development and this is where we need the international partners to intervene,” he added.
Dr. Riek stated that he want South Sudanese to move freely to every state they wished to visit and import goods to be consumed in towns without interrogations by the so-called unknown gunmen.
“We should resolve all the security issues before the 12th of September 2023 such that we can be proud and when we go to the UN general assembly, and talk about peace of our context, the government have sent delegation led by one of the vice presidents Hussein is going under difficult task because what the international community said here today is what they will hear today in New York which is all about the security arrangements,” he stated.
The FVP said the government including the partners will have to coordinate for a better peace celebration next year than this year.
“We would celebrate together our own peace day which is the 12 of September and moving forward to the 21st of December so that we have a bigger gathering to tell the world that we are people in peace,” Dr. Riek noted.
The last time South Sudan celebrated peace was on the 31st of October 2018 and that was about some 40 days after the signing of the Revitalized Peace Agreement.
Dr. Riek Machar said that the implementation of the agreement has not been going smoothly as many of the speakers have spoken about the challenges in the implementation of the agreement.
“I want you to mark the progress we have made because it is important that we have made a giant step towards implementing the peace agreement as it’s been witnessed by majority of us in the Country and worldwide,” Dr. Riek stressed.
The First Vice President acknowledged that the first achievement made in the Country was the tremendous step of graduating the unified forces in their various capacities which is the first phase of the security arrangement implementation.
“With security forces, we can consolidate peace and that alone guaranteed that there is peace in South Sudan,” he asserted.
He further underscored that the security arrangement is the backbone to the 2018 Revitalized Peace Agreement saying once half of it is implemented, and continuously implementing the rest, full peace would be achieved.
“We need peace in our country because any dreams we have will be achieved and without peace, we would not achieve it,” he cited.
“We should have been planning election by 22nd of December 2022 and when we realized that is creating anxiety and people are thoughtful, we had to sit to agree on the extension of the transitional period which will start on the 23rd of February 2023 till 22nd of 2025 and it is because there are critical aspects of the agreement that we must implement all of us,” Dr. Riek justified the roadmap extension.
He echoed that the government must conclude and complete the implementation of the security arrangements and must get to working on the constitution as now the country is being run on the transitional constitution as amended.
“We shall introduce a constitution because it is important for our people to know the provisions in the agreement that has been changed hopefully before six months to the extended transitional period,” he promised.
He urged all the partners in the implementation of the peace process to mark the achievement of the government as tirelessly done in the implementation of the agreement.