50,000 uprooted by war in Sudan’s Shilluk area: UN
NAIROBI, April 18, (Reuters) – At least 50,000 people have been driven from their homes in Sudan’s Upper Nile region by fighting in the past month between government forces and rebels, the United Nations said on Sunday.
“Villages have been burnt while looting and rapes have been reported. Civilian infrastructure including schools and clinics have been destroyed,” said a U.N. statement about the region’s Shilluk kingdom, home of the black African Shilluk people.
“The United Nations in Sudan is concerned at the humanitarian consequences of conflict in the Shilluk Kingdom.”
It said the violence pitted the army and militia loyal to the government in Khartoum against southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which has been fighting for greater autonomy from the Islamist government in the Arab speaking north for 20 years.
The Khartoum government and SPLA are in the final stages of talks hosted by neighbouring Kenya aimed at ending a war which has killed about two million people and uprooted four million in large areas of the south of the country.
Disputes over oil, ethnicity and ideology have complicated the conflict.
U.N. and non-governmental groups in a consortium of relief organisations known as Operation Lifeline Sudan have been forced to suspend operations and relocate staff several times this year due to the conflict in the Shilluk kingdom.
The latest suspension began on 30 March and remains in force due to continuing insecurity.
“Since early March, at least 50,000 people have been displaced by militia attacks and clashes between Government of Sudan and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) forces in the area,” the statement said.
“The U.N. in Sudan urges all armed groups to protect the lives, property and human rights of civilians and to cease attacks on civilian targets,” the statement said.
Compounds of international non-governmental groups in the Shilluk kingdom’s Nyilwak town were also burnt in the attacks.
The 50,000 displaced civilians have taken refuge in various places including an estimated 13,000 in the main government-held town of the region, Malakal. Others, including those from Tonga and Nyilwak towns, are in places where effective control is unclear, the statement said.
Details of the humanitarian impact outside Malakal are hard to obtain, due to lack of sufficient security to mount assessments. U.N. relief operations for the displaced in Malakal are however under way, the statement said.
Regional analysts said that the fighting followed months of steadily rising political tensions in Shilluk.
The political atmosphere worsened after senior Shilluk politician Lam Akol decided in October 2003 to rejoin the SPLM/A more than 10 years after he broke from the movement.
Some of his followers did not agree with his move to merge his Sudan People’s Liberation Army-United with the much larger main southern rebel movement, John Garang’s SPLA.
Lam Akol spent part of the 1990s as a government minister and part as a politician opposed to both Khartoum and the SPLA.
A senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official said on Sunday that time is running short for about a million Sudanese displaced by a separate fight in the country’s remote western Darfur region, where rebels launched a revolt last year.
Rebels in Darfur accuse the Khartoum government of neglect and of arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages.