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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Jan 05 2010 - 16:20:59 EST
S.Sudan vote could lead to war, says top adviser
Tue Jan 5, 2010 2:04pm GMT
KHARTOUM, Jan 5 (Reuters) - South Sudan's vote on independence next year
will lead to a new war unless key questions of the north-south border,
nationality and external debts are resolved, a senior presidential adviser
said.
Ghazi Salaheddin from President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's National Congress
Party (NCP) criticised the law governing the 2011 referendum passed in
December after months of wrangling, saying it lacked any deadline to address
outstanding problems.
"Imagine if we had the referendum and separation happened and we had not yet
agreed on the borders? This is war," he told the small state-owned Blue Nile
television, according to a transcript seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
Most of Sudan's oil fields traverse the north-south border which has yet to
be demarcated. Sudan's external debt is about $30 billion.
Salaheddin said hundreds of thousands of southerners in the north and
northerners living in the south would be left in limbo if their
nationalities were not defined.
He also warned of regional problems over what international agreements would
be respected by a separate south, giving the example of an agreement over
Nile waters with Egypt.
"The government cannot go ahead with this referendum until some of these
issues have been discussed," he said.
"It is (now) possible that the ... southerners could vote for separation
without us having settled the issues of the border, nationality and
international agreements and this is a prescription for war," he said.
The southern former rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), which
signed a 2005 north-south agreement sharing wealth and power, called
Sahaleddin hostile and said he wanted to rewrite the peace deal.
"If you make these things conditions for the referendum then it will never
come," Atem Garang, the SPLM's deputy speaker of parliament, told Reuters.
He said some key issues like the border could be decided before the 2011
vote, but a six-month period after any vote for secession had been set aside
to discuss outstanding problems.
Fought over issues including religion, ethnicity, ideology and oil, a
north-south civil war that began in 1983 claimed an estimated 2 million
lives and drove 4 million from their homes, destabilising much of east
Africa.
Five years of stalling in implementing the 2005 peace deal has fuelled
distrust between the NCP and SPLM and many fear a return to war if there is
a hint of malpractice during the referendum. (Writing by Opheera McDoom;
editing by Andrew Roche)
C Thomson Reuters 2010 All rights reserved
South Sudan army-civilian clash kills 17--official
Tue Jan 5, 2010 7:21pm GMT
By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Sudan, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Seventeen people were killed on Thursday when
armed civilians ambushed south Sudanese soldiers trying to disarm tribes
following heavy fighting in the semi-autonomous region last year, an
official said on Tuesday.
A 2005 peace deal ended more than two decades of north-south civil war, but
the south Sudan army has found it difficult to disarm civilians in the
lawless south and tribal violence claimed an estimated 2,500 lives in the
south last year.
"The soldiers clashed with armed civilians, 13 were killed from the
soldiers' side and four from the civilians," Lakes State Deputy Governor
David Noc Marial told Reuters. The civilians' refusal to disarm was behind
the ambush, he said.
Five people were killed in clashes between troops and armed civilians
earlier last week, Marial said, after a young man who refused to give up his
gun was shot dead. "The civilian was killed on the spot ... the relatives
ran after the soldiers."
The International Crisis Group think tank put the number of people killed in
cattle raids and revenge attacks last year at about 2,500, many of them
women and children.
The violence, mostly in Jonglei which borders the Lakes State, led to
renewed calls for the disarmament of communities bristling with guns
accumulated during the north-south war.
Analysts worry that a security vacuum in rural areas could lead to more
intense violence ahead of elections in April and a southern vote on
secession in 2011.
Marial said that disarmament in the Lakes State had been temporarily halted.
"We've taken the soldiers to one side and evacuated them until there is
peace in the area," he said.
Some 2 million people were killed in the north-south war, fought over
differing religious, political and ethnic identities and ideology, inflamed
by the discovery of oil in the south. An additional 4 million were forced to
flee their homes. (Editing by Opheera McDoom and Tim Pearce)
C Thomson Reuters 2010 All rights reserved