Peace in south Sudan may worsen war in west
By Matthew Green
NAIROBI, Jan 8 (Reuters) – Progress towards ending 20 years of war in south Sudan may worsen an almost forgotten conflict between rebels, soldiers and camel-riding marauders consuming the west of the country, analysts said on Thursday.
The government and southern rebels signed a deal at talks in Kenya on Wednesday on how to share oil revenues and other wealth, jumping a big hurdle towards striking a final agreement to end the longest-running civil war in Africa.
Images of handshakes at a plush hotel on a lakeshore where hippos graze at night obscured a darker outlook for Sudan’s western Darfur region, where 30,000 people fled last month from a conflict almost unknown to the outside world.
The International Crisis Group think-tank said in a report published in December that an end to the war in the south could become the catalyst for a new and bloody chapter in Darfur unless negotiations are broadened to include western rebels.
“There’s an obvious risk of resolving one civil war while another one continues to get worse,” David Mozersky, analyst with the International Crisis Group, told Reuters.
The fear is that as the southern rebels and government carve out a settlement to suit them both, rebels in other parts of Sudan including the west may feel under increasing pressure to step up fighting to win a place at the negotiating table.
The Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) emerged as a fighting force in Darfur last February, saying it wanted to end what it said was government discrimination against black Africans at the expense of Arab communities in the arid region.
The SLM/A is a separate movement from the main southern rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), although both accuse the Islamist government of long-standing policies of depriving their impoverished regions of power and resources.
Unlike rebels from southern Sudan, who are mainly animist and Christian, Darfur’s rebels are Muslims.
“PREPARING FOR WAR”
Western rebels fear a peace deal in the south will allow the government to divert fighters from southern garrisons to launch an offensive with regular troops and government-backed Janjaweed militias who charge into villages on horses and camels. “The government says it’s going to talk to us, but that’s a tactical move,” said a SLM/A spokesman Ahmed Abdelshafi Yagoub. “We think that the government is preparing for war,” he said.
Washington hopes a deal to end a war which has claimed two million lives will transform its ties with Sudan, a country it lists as a state sponsor of terrorism and where oil production is rising.
But fighting in Darfur could complicate the implementation of any final accord.
Prospects for a speedy resolution in the west look grim. The conflict in Darfur has escalated in the past year, forcing at least 600,000 people to flee. Many are huddled in camps in neighbouring Chad, beyond the reach of aid workers.
In an echo of abuses long familiar in the conflict in the south, Amnesty International says it has received lists of hundreds of civilians killed in the west and names of children said to have been abducted by government-backed militia.