Sudan peace talks to resume, little progress seen

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) -- Sudan's government and southern rebels will resume talks on Thursday to try to end the 17-year-long civil war in Africa's biggest country, but no major breakthrough is expected.

The Islamist government in Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) remain deeply divided over the imposition of sharia, or Islamic law, and more than two years of talks have yielded little progress.

"Any peace talks are due to fail as long as they insist that sharia, the Islamic law, will remain the supreme law of the land," SPLA leader John Garang told Reuters earlier this month.

Nevertheless Garang -- whose SPLA is fighting for greater autonomy for the mainly Christian and animist south -- says he is committed to the talks, being held in Nairobi under the auspices of the Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional peace forum.

As the two delegations prepare to talk, fighting is continuing in parts of the country, especially near the government-held oil fields of southern Sudan.

An estimated two million people, most of them civilians, have died in the conflict and in the periodic famines which have come in the wake of war.

The SPLA briefly suspended its participation in the talks earlier this year in protest at what it called the reckless bombing of civilian targets by government forces.

On Monday, a government plane dropped more than a dozen bombs on a Roman Catholic mission and clinic at Narus in southern Sudan, according to local aid workers.

The Roman Catholic missionary news agency MISNA said six people had been injured in the bombing raid, but the local Catholic diocese said on Tuesday that one of them had died.

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