The ambassador of the US to the security council Susan Rice said on Wednesday that the security council will not vote for sanctions against Khartoum and Juba because of non-commitment to the time frame set in the UN security council resolution 2046 that calls on the two parties to engage in talks to solve the issues of dispute in two weeks. Rice said this is not surprise, but the target of doing that as soon as possible remains. She said that the goal of the decision was not the sanctions; the goal was to stop fighting and make the two parties to return to the negotiations table. She said that the good news is the decline of the violence in the past ten days. On the withdrawal of South Sudan forces from Abyei, Rice said that the withdrawal was already made, urging the Sudanese side to do the same thing. The assistant of the Foreign Secretary for African Affairs has called on the two sides to sit to the negotiation table, saying that they cannot make any progress in the battle fields. No doubt that the whole matter looks strange because it seems like if the all efforts at the UN and the AU shades in the resolution 2046 were aimed to force the two parties to negotiate and to withdraw from Abyei.. If yes, the matter did not deserve all these efforts because the US had just to put pressures on South Sudan, the party that rejects talks, to push it to return to negotiation table. The US intervention could be also of much help to the South Sudanese citizens who suffer from the decision of their government to shut down oil fields. Now, about 5 million citizens in South Sudan are facing the danger of starvation.
