Donald Booth, U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan.

The US Government is urging the warring parties in South Sudan to speed up the formation of a joint Monitoring and Verification Team to ensure the two agreements are implemented.

The US Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, Donald Booth, said the two parties must also prepare for the political talks.

He was speaking to journalists after the IGAD Summit on South Sudan which took place on the sidelines of the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa this afternoon.

“I have been in the region for the past month working, trying to help the IGAD mediation team and others who are trying to bring a better resolution of the crisis in South Sudan. I think we have made a lot of progress getting to a cessation of hostilities agreement and the agreement on the release of detainees, which the government has begun to implement with the release of the seven of the former senior SPLM members,” he said.

“The important thing now is to move forward on the monitoring and verification of the ceasefire agreement for the parties then to agree on the way forward for the political talks. This ultimately began as a problem within the SPLM. The roots of these problems are political and the solution to it will have to be political, but will have to involve a broader cross-section of South Sudanese society in order to ensure that the solutions are durable, and that we don’t have South Sudan sliding back into conflict again,” he added.

Last week, the two parties signed two agreements on a cessation of hostilities and the question of the status of the detainees.