The Sudanese government and the main southern rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) will begin discussing the final comprehensive peace agreement in June, a senior rebel official said Thursday in Nairobi.

"We will start discussion on June 22 on comprehensive cease-fire issues and then will focus on mechanism and modalities of the implementation," SPLM/A Spokesman Yasir Arman told Xinhua.

"If all these have finished, we hope to sign the final deal late July or early August," he added.

The Sudanese civil war broke out in 1983 when the SPLM/A took up arms fighting for self-determination in the southern part of the country, leaving some two million people dead, mostly through war-induced famine and disease.

The Sudanese government and the SPLM/A began peace talks in March 1994 in Kenya, under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, a seven-member regional group in east Africa, consisting of Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Uganda, Eritrea, Somalia and the Sudan.

The parties late Wednesday signed three key peace protocols on power sharing, the two conflict areas of Nuba (Kordofan) Mountains and Southern Blue Nile, and another disputed area of Abyei, paving the way for a full cease-fire and implementation pact to end a war that has cut Africa's biggest country in two for over two decades.

Together with the previously signed accords on wealth sharing and establishing a six-year interim period for the southerners to make their own political choice, they are as a whole being widely regarded as a milestone on the road to ending the longest civil war on the African continent.