South Sudan soldiers shoot skyward in salary protest

Dec 15, 2006 (JUBA) — Heavy gunfire has broken out in the southern Sudanese capital of Juba as hundreds of disgruntled soldiers opened fire into the air to protest non-payment of their salaries.

A battalion of about 700 fighters from the ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) that signed a peace deal with Khartoum two years ago, shot skywards spreading panic and bringing the town to a standstill, they said.

At least one person, a pedestrian, was killed by a motorist speeding to avoid the gunfire on the main street in Juba, the capital of autonomous southern Sudan created by the 1995 peace agreement, a UN official said.

The battalion, based on the eastern bank of the River Nile that runs through the town, defied warnings to stop and crossed the river, marching through the main part of town demanding unpaid salaries for last month, witnesses said.

“It started after the battalion started demonstrating for their November salaries,” the UN official told AFP on Friday. “There is now shooting on both sides of the Nile.”

Witnesses said the soldiers gathered at the tomb in Juba of the late SPLA leader John Garang, who died last year after leading the movement in its 21-year fight against Khartoum and signing peace deal.

Negotiations to end the raucous demonstration were underway, they said.

The cash-strapped autonomous government of southern Sudan has often complained of delays in getting its share of revenue from the federal government in Khartoum owed it under the agreement.

The deal, signed in Kenya in January 2005, ended what was then Africa’s longest running civil war that had claimed some 1.5 million lives and displaced four million people.

(AFP)