"We came with a fresh mandate," Taban Deng Gai, chief negotiator for the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO), told a Tuesday press conference in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, which will host a fresh round of peace talks on Wednesday.
The new round of talks comes after a month-long recess during which negotiators returned home for consultations with their respective leaderships.
Gai said the SPLM-IO had held consultations in Pagak, an entry point on the border between Ethiopia and South Sudan.
At the meeting, Gai said, the rebel group had decided to cede executive power to incumbent South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, but on the condition that he would share his powers with a prime minister for a transitional period.
Formation of a council of ministers is another demand the SPLM-IO will likely put forth at the upcoming talks, Gai told reporters, along with a "two-army arrangement" during the interim period.
Gabriel Changson Chang, for his part, chairman of the rebel group's finance and resource committee, chimed in on the matter, attributing the group's demands for a two-army arrangement to "practical, not political, reasons."
"There is no longer a national army [in South Sudan] right now," he said.
"When Salva Kiir decided to fight his own people, he first took over one side to fight the other side, so two armies were created. Some went to [SPLM-IO] and some went with Salva, while others went to their homes," Chang added.
He went so far as to accuse Kiir of "turning the presidential guard into his own militia, before bringing [others] recruited from his own ethnicity, from his own villages."
The two armies, Chang said, "will be kept separate… but they will have a joint command."
He added: "There will be one body co-chaired by a managing organ until they are amalgamated."
According to Gai, other demands voiced at the Pagak meeting to be raised at the talks in Ethiopia are "compensation, reparation and formation of a federal system with 21 federal states."
"If these five demands are met, there will be peace in South Sudan," he asserted.
South Sudan has been shaken by violence since December of last year, when President Kiir accused his sacked vice-president, Riek Machar, of leading a failed coup attempt against his regime.
In the one year since, the conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced nearly two million people and led to an increasingly dire humanitarian situation.
In recent months, the warring camps have held on-again, off-again peace talks in Addis Ababa under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional bloc based in Djibouti.
The talks, however, have yet to produce any breakthroughs.
