President Omar al-Bashir, in Accra to participate in the 5th African-African American Summit, told reporters during a news conference that the persistent charge that his government condones slavery "is another device in the war of propaganda" against Sudan.

"It can be refuted by the same film propagated worldwide," the president told reporters, referring to a widely distributed film allegedly documenting the purchase of slaves from southern Sudan from Arab slavemasters of the north. "I viewed the film. The whole process of buying and selling is a setup, a facade orchestrated and implemented in rebel-controlled areas."

The president was accompanied to the press conference by two members of his government—Lam Akol, a former rebel leader of the opposition SPLA, and Agnes Lokodu, the female minister of labor and a former governor of a southern state. Both are Christians.

Speaking through an interpreter, President al-Bashir said Baroness Lady Cox, a member of the British Parliament and a Christian fundamentalist, is fueling the propaganda war against Sudan. The civil war in Sudan between the mostly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south has been raging since 1955—after the British occupiers were driven out of the country—with a decade of peace from 1972 to 1983, as a result of the Addis Ababa Agreement.

An irony to the charge of slavery, according to the president, is that half of the refugees fleeing the fighting in the south come to the north for protection. "Why would they jump into the lap of their enslavers?" he asked.

The president said that a 1987 conference recommended that issues that divide north and south—political power sharing, economic development and the adequate addressing of the question of culture—could best be addressed by establishing a federal system, which now consists of 26 states. Each state has its own governor and Parliament, he said. On the question of law, President al-Bashir explained that Muslim laws for criminal offenses only apply to Muslims in the country.

"Unfortunately, we discovered there was gross foreign intervention," he said. "As a consequence we developed a strategy of peace from within … direct contacts with opposition forces."

In recent years, six of the seven opposition forces have signed a new peace agreement, which provides for a referendum for the south to decide if it will secede from the north.

"No government in Africa has done anything to that level (before)," President al-Bashir said of putting the secession issue before the voters. "Still, the rebel (faction of John Garang) will not come to the (peace) table, which tells us volumes. He is hostage to foreign powers," the president said.

Mr. Akol said he abandoned the SPLA because of the peace agreement’s offer of secession.

He said that when the al-Bashir government first came to power, it contacted all the rebel groups and offered a peaceful resolution to the problem.

"The problem continues because one faction out of seven refused to sign the peace agreement; and the reason is because it has connections to the opposition in the north—the people who were overthrown by the present government—and also some countries that don’t want to see peace in Sudan because they have some ax to grind with the present government."

Even when he was in the opposition, there was no issue of slavery, Mr. Akol said. He cited a book called "Cry of the Owl," written by Garang supporter Francis Deng, which documents "mutual abductions" between the Dinka tribes of the south and the Arab tribes of the north who have a common border and share water sources.

"I believe that mutual abductions are still going on between them, but there is no official policy of having people enslaved by the government. This kind of propaganda appeared just after 1991, and by then America was supporting the SPLA" where before it was not, Mr. Akol told The Final Call.