Northerners in southern Sudan fear post-peace ethnic cleansing
By Mohamed Ali Saeed
KHARTOUM, Sept 18 (AFP) — Northern merchants in southern Sudan are accusing the rebel movement of contemplating “ethnic cleansing” and of confiscating northerners’ property in rebel-held areas.
Siddeiq Mohamed Korak, secretary general of the Northern Merchants Union in the south, has been visiting Khartoum to communicate their grievances and fears to the authorities here after speaking to reporters about the problem.
“Persons affiliated to the (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army) have confiscated shops, farms and houses of some of the northern merchants and gave them to some southerners in an unexpected act ahead of conclusion of a peace accord,” Korak told journalists.
“In part, I have come here for safety as I have escaped assassination in a miracle,” the well-known businessman said.
“Groups of the People’s Army have driven a number of northerners out of their houses and killed everyone who refused to comply with their orders,” Korak said.
He declined to give figures or mention specific cases, saying the merchants would reveal everything after communicating all grievances to the authorities.
He said some SPLA groups “have actually begun carrying out an ethnic cleansing policy of expelling the northerners from the south on grounds they are intruders.”
Korak estimated the number of northerners there at around one million of whom around a thousand are working as merchants in different parts of the south.
He appealed to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), regional sponsors of the peace process in Kenya, and Arab League member nations and other countries concerned with the peace process in Sudan to include in the forthcoming peace agreement an article providing for safeguarding the property and families of the northerners from the “imminent danger.”
Korak complained that an appeal his delegation made to a number of officals in the government went unheeded because, he reasoned, the government “is falling under pressure by international powers that recognise only the rights of the christian and animist southerners.”
The delegation also communicated their grievances to the Khartoum-based Sudanese Group for Human Rights (SGHR) that is chaired by human rights activist lawyer Ghazi Suleiman.
Suleiman told AFP that the delegation handed him a memorandum, which he said they would also pass on to the US embassy here, accusing the SPLA of confiscating the property of the northern merchants in the south.
The merchants are anxious about their fate after a peace deal is signed by the government and SPLA and wanted to know whether they could retrieve their belongings which have now been confiscated by the rebels in SPLA-controlled areas in the south, said Suleiman.
He said the merchants have voiced their anxiety for themselves and their belongings in case the government troops withdrew from the south. The northern merchants have vast investments, particularly in tea and coffee plantationsin the south, Suleiman noted.
“They asked me to introduce them to the IGAD Secretariat and to the United States, which they believe is the key peace sponsor, to take the rights of the northerners in the south into consideration upon conclusion of the peace agreement,” Suleiman said.