Sudan’s SPLA free 173 detainees

Oct 17, 2005 (KHARTOUM) — Former southern Sudanese rebels released 173 prisoners on Monday following the signing in January of a peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war in Africa’s largest country.

The former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) formed a new coalition government in September as part of the January agreement and said these were the last prisoners they had held in their areas in the east.

“There were 173 in total. They are soldiers, some of them are officers, who were captured on the battlefield in eastern Sudan between 1998-2001,” SPLM spokesman Walid Hamid said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said they received the 173 detainees and would be providing them with basic needs like clothes and medical check ups.

The handover took place in the SPLM-area of Shalalo on the Eritrean-Sudanese border, about 90 km (56 miles) outside Kassala town in eastern Sudan, Hamid said.

He could not say how many prisoners the SPLM had released to date, or how many were left in the areas they controlled in the south. But he said the SPLM had been releasing detainees since 1994.

Hamid said government did not have any prisoners to release because they had killed them all.

“It’s a very black mark in the national army’s history that they don’t respect the Geneva Convention,” he said. “They don’t spare their lives,” he added.

Sudan’s state interior minister has said the government had no prisoners because they released them many years ago.

The southern civil war claimed 2 million lives, mostly from hunger and disease. It broadly pitted the Islamist government in Khartoum against mostly Christian and animist rebels, complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology.

(Reuters)