Red Cross: 176 detainees freed by Sudan’s SPLM

Oct 18, 2005 (GENEVA) — A total of 176 detainees who had been held for more than five years in the Sudanese civil war were released Tuesday by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the international Red Cross said.

The war – which pitted the Muslim Arab-led government in Khartoum and the mostly Christian and animist south, led by the SPLM – lasted over two decades until a peace deal last month.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Sudanese Red Crescent society transferred the prisoners from their places of detention in the east of the country and handed them over to Sudanese authorities in Khartoum, an ICRC statement said.

“ICRC delegates held private interviews with all the released detainees prior to their transfer to establish that each was returning home of his own free will,” the statement said. “The ICRC also offered them access to medical services.”

The ICRC first registered the detainees in 2002 and visited them to monitor the conditions they were being held in and to allow them to communicate with their families through the Red Cross message service.

Both Sudan’s government and the SPLM had requested the ICRC’s services as a neutral intermediary. The ICRC said it was the third – and largest – such operation it had assisted with this year, involving the release and transfer of more than 300 detainees held by the SPLM.

The peace accord, which was agreed in January, provided for an autonomous south with its own army, national power and wealth sharing, religious freedom and a new constitution during a six-year interim period. After those six years, the 10 southern states will hold a referendum on independence.

(AP)