UN dispatches emergency assessment team to Sudan’s disputed Abyei

May 17, 2008 (JUBA) — The United Nations on Saturday dispatched a first emergency assessment team to Sudan’s disputed area of Abyei since evacuating staff after deadly clashes erupted, officials said.

The extent of the destruction in the town of Abyei — an impoverished settlement in the heart of a contested district on the border between north and south — is not clear and the UN had previously evacuated all civilian staff.

The team is set to arrive on Sunday to assess the emergency response for thousands of people displaced by days of fighting between Sudanese government forces and southern ex-rebels.

“The assessment team is going in tomorrow,” Ted Chaiban, the Sudan representative for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.

“As soon as they get in, within 24 hours we would have an immediate response,” he told journalists in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan.

Aid workers and south Sudan politicians have told AFP they had reports of bodies lying in the streets, looting and fires in the ramshackle town of flimsy mud huts.

The visiting deputy executive director of UNICEF, Hilde Johnson, warned that non-resolution of the conflicts in Abyei and Sudan’s western region of Darfur are derailing plans to put more children in school.

Chaiban said that half of the approximately 30,000 people displaced by the Abyei clashes are children.

A UN spokeswoman in southern Sudan, Antonette Miday, said another UN team had been dispatched to Abyei’s neighbouring state of Warrap.

On Friday, the special representative of the UN secretary general in Sudan, Ashraf Qazi, welcomed an agreement to end the fighting in Abyei.

Clashes began in town on Wednesday between the army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army, who fought a 21-year civil war with Khartoum ended by a peace agreement in 2005, following an isolated incident north of Abyei.

Impasse over the area — whose oil wealth is bitterly contested by the two sides — is one of the stumbling blocks delaying implementation of the peace deal and exacerbating tensions between north and south.

In 2011, Abyei will hold a referendum on whether to retain its special administrative status in the north or be incorporated into the south.

A second referendum on whether the south should break away as an independent state will also be held.

(AFP)