20101108
africanews
The United States has promised Sudan to remove from its list of states sponsors of terrorism if Khartoum ensures two key referendums take place on time.
The US president Barack Obama made the offer through Senator John Kerry who said it was part of a proposal to help resolve disputes over the referendum.
Senator Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, passed on the offer during a visit to Khartoum over the weekend.
"We like to consider this a pay-for-performance operation," one US official told the Reuters news agency.
Sen Kerry has said last month the goal of the US was to "see a peaceful Sudan, one with which we can have a normal relationship".
The sanction which was first imposed on Sudan's support for regional terrorism in 1993 has banned all trade and investment in Sudan.
Sudan was added to the US list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1993 after it was accused of harbouring Islamist militants. At the time, Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network were among those based there.
Four years later, the US imposed comprehensive economic, trade, and financial sanctions against Sudan, citing its continued support for terrorism. Separate sanctions were imposed in 2007 over the conflict in the western region in Darfur.
Barack Obama renewed US economic sanctions on Sudan for at least one year, keeping pressure on Khartoum to hold referendum on timetable but it will remove early in 2011 if Sudan hols referendums on time.
Leaders in North Sudan have said it is now impossible to hold a referendum on the future of an oil-rich region along the country's north-south border while southern Sudanese politicians have insisted that the vote must go ahead.
The vote on Abyei region is scheduled to take place at the same time as the referendum on southern independence. Abyei residents would decide whether to remain in the north or join the south.
It was part of the 2005 deal that had ended Africa’s longest civil war that killed about two million people and displaced another four million.
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