UN team to assess Sudanese army-SPLA face off

Jan 12, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Sudanese and U.N. officials were heading to rebel-held east Sudan on Thursday to investigate a face off between former southern guerrilla and Sudanese army forces which may threaten a 2005 peace deal, officials said.

SPLA troops line up during a public rally in Rumbek on January 10, 2005 to celebrate a final peace agreement with the Khartoum government that was signed in Kenya January 9.

The former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) said 3,000 Sudanese army troops and four tanks rolled into the Hamesh Koreb province on Wednesday and set up camp just 200 metres from their trenches, threatening to take over SPLM positions.

“There is a joint team that is going with the United Nations and … they are going to verify right now in Hamesh Koreb,” Elias Waya Nyipuocs, acting SPLM military spokesman told Reuters in an interview in Khartoum.

“If it is not resolved then it is going to damage everything,” he said. “The (peace deal) will not be there and maybe people will go back to war.”

U.N. spokesman George Somerwil confirmed a joint team of Sudanese army, U.N. and SPLM officials was trying to access the area, but could give no further details.

During the more than two decades of north-south civil war — Africa’s longest civil war — the SPLM reached and fought alongside separate eastern rebel groups in the province of Hamesh Koreb, which borders Eritrea.

Those eastern rebels said their forces in the area had been attacked by the Sudanese army on Wednesday. The SPLM could not confirm that fighting.

Under the southern peace deal, signed on Jan. 9, 2005, the SPLM were supposed to redeploy their forces in the east back to the south within a year. They said they had been delayed for logistical reasons.

The top U.N. envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk, has said the SPLM’s slow redeployment was a major problem for the peace deal.

There was no official word from Sudan, but a Sudanese army source said the army had done nothing wrong. “The peace deal is known. The SPLM was supposed to have withdrawn from the east within a year and that year is over,” he told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Nyipuocs said Sudanese armed forces had told him they had been ordered to withdraw on Wednesday night but it was unclear whether they had done so.

Under the southern peace deal, a coalition government was formed and separate armies created for the north and south. Joint army units were formed in most major towns and in the capital Khartoum.

Nyipuocs said the 1,500 SPLM troops in the Khartoum joint unit were already preparing to withdraw back to their rebel camps unless the Sudanese army withdrew from Hamesh Koreb, a move that would be a step backwards for the peace process.

“The SPLM (military) command … are now taking very tough and serious measures,” he said.

(Reuters)