Eight years ago a newly elected American administration sent a special envoy to Sudan. Sen. John Danforth put aside several years of failed United States policy and "advocacy" toward Sudan, and accepted at face value Sudanese proposals to end the civil war in southern Sudan between the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and the Sudanese government.
Several years of American and European-brokered negotiations resulted in the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended Africa's longest-running conflict, established a coalition government and set a timetable for presidential and parliamentary elections and a landmark referendum on unity or separation for the south.
It was perhaps the Bush administration's only foreign policy success. Four years later a similar watershed has presented itself. A new administration in Washington can play a similarly pivotal role by brokering peace in Darfur - the focus since 2003 of another conflict - as well as reinforcing and sustaining the unfolding north-south peace process.
At face value, peace in Darfur in 2009 is much closer than the prospect of peace in southern Sudan was in 2001. All the stated reasons for the start of the Darfur conflict - political and economic marginalization - together with security arrangements, have been addressed in the internationally brokered 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA). The DPA, which runs to more than 100 pages, is undoubtedly the basis for peace in Darfur.
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