President Salva Kiir today during a meeting with the Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus agreed to attend a summit of the regional bloc IGAD on 18 January.
The East African regional body has already held six summits on the crisis in South Sudan since December 2013. This will be the seventh.
“I had a very fruitful discussion with his Excellency President Salva Kiir Mayardit,” Tedros told journalists after the meeting.
“We had two issues to discuss: one is on the upcoming IGAD summit in Addis Ababa in January 18. So he will be attending there, and we discussed on the progress of the peace talks and also on the preparations for the upcoming IGAD summit.”
He said he hoped the summit would build on the progress of the previous IGAD summit and “break the stalemate.”
“During the last summit there was agreement even on most of the issues, and there were very few sticky issues and a recess was agreed and for the two parties to come back after consulting their constituencies. So we will start by listening to the report from their consultation, but as I said earlier, since there was agreement on most of the issues we will build on the issues that were agreed previously.”
For his part, South Sudan’s Foreign Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin said that the Ethiopian prime minister had a “very warm and heart-to-heart discussion” with the South Sudanese president. During the meeting the president “agreed to attend the IGAD summit on the 18th”
The South Sudanese minister also emphasized that there are good relations between South Sudan and Ethiopia and he dismissed “rumors” of poor relations.
Likewise, Tedros announced plans for an upcoming bilateral meeting of a “joint ministerial commission” between Ethiopia and South Sudan in February.
“There are some agreements now being drafted… and we hope the next joint ministerial commission that will be held in Addis Ababa will take our bilateral relationship to even higher level,” said the Ethiopian foreign minister.