Refugees return to South Sudan’s Malakal after fighting

Dec 04, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Refugees who fled a week of fighting in the South Sudan town of Malakal returned to their homes on Monday as the Sudanese army and former southern rebels agreed to ban weapons from the city center, the U.N. said.

More than 150 people were killed and 400 injured in clashes between government forces and ex-rebels from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Malakal during one of the worst breaches to a 2005 peace agreement that ended 21 years of civil war between north and south Sudan.

The U.N. mission in Sudan said in a statement that joint units of United Nations and northern and southern soldiers were patrolling the town by day. Each faction patrols their parts of the town at night, the U.N. said.

All sides have agreed that “no soldier can carry weapons except for the military personnel in patrol” or on other duties in Malakal, the statement said.

Under the 2005 peace deal, mostly Christian SPLM rebels were given some key positions in the northern Muslim government, and both sides agreed to share oil revenues.

But the situation in Malakal and other towns close to the north-south boundary has remained volatile. Located in the Upper Nile state close to some of Sudan’s richest oil fields, Malakal lies on the Nile River, 400 miles (643.7 kilometers) south of Khartoum, the capital.

Several minor clashes have been reported in recent weeks.

Government officials accuse former rebel fighters of banditry, both in the capital where they often serve as bodyguards for southern officials and in the largely lawless south.

A former rebel and five police officers died in a shootout in Khartoum last month, which the government described as an isolated incident. But a southern official said it was a foiled assassination attempt and said southerners were bracing for more possible attacks.

Forces from both sides traded blames on who had ignited the latest fighting in Malakal, which began two weeks ago and ended on Friday with a U.N.-brokered cease-fire.

International observers say the situation has grown increasingly tense in recent months, because Khartoum and the semiautonomous south disagree on how to solve a separate crisis in the wartorn Darfur region and because the southern peace deal is proving difficult to implement.

“The peace agreement isn’t in danger, but what happened in Malakal is a serious wake up call,” U.N. official in Sudan said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

In Darfur, the U.N. said ongoing violence continued to target civilians, along with international aid workers.

There were reports that the Sudanese army and allied militias twice attacked the north Darfur village of Abu Sakeen in recent days, burning it down, killing civilians and looting cattle, the U.N. statement said.

The U.N. also said it evacuated more than 30 aid workers from various west Darfur towns because of violence on the border with Chad.

Some 2 million people were killed during the decades of fighting in south Sudan, which ended as separate violence spiraled in the western Darfur region where 200,000 people have died since 2003.

(AP)