Southern Sudan fighting could hit peace push-mediators
NAIROBI, April 19, (Reuters) – Pro-government forces attacked civilians and destroyed villages in Sudan’s Upper Nile region in fresh violence that could harm efforts to end civil war in Africa’s largest country, peace mediators said on Monday.
The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a mediation group of East African nations, said at least 70,000 people had been driven from their homes by a month of fighting in the Shilluk kingdom, home of the black African Shilluk tribe.
Reporting scenes reminiscent of a separate conflict in western Darfur region, an IGAD statement said observers in an IGAD verification monitoring team (VMT) saw torched villages and fresh graves this month in Shilluk areas hit by fighting.
The Sudan government denied its forces were involved.
“The ongoing fighting is between factions of the Shilluk,” a spokeswoman at the Sudan embassy in Nairobi told Reuters. She added government forces were not involved.
U.N. officials say the violence pits army troops and militia loyal to the government against southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which has been fighting for greater autonomy from the Arabic-speaking north for 20 years.
But IGAD said its VMT teams had seen evidence of violence committed deliberately against civilians.
“The IGAD Verification Monitoring Team (VMT) confirmed on Monday that it has evidence of a campaign of violence by forces allied to the Government of Sudan against civilians in the Shilluk Kingdom (Upper Nile region),” it said.
“With the peace talks between the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the SPLA at a critical stage, the VMT urged the GoS and SPLM/A to restrain allied forces and other armed groups under their overall control,” it added.
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.
But the peace talks have been stuck for weeks over whether Islamic sharia law should be imposed in the capital Khartoum, in the Muslim north of the country.
The peace talks do not apply to a separate conflict in western Darfur region in which about 10,000 people have been killed and 750,000 displaced.
The violence in the Shilluk kingdom, Sudan’s newest arena of conflict, erupted despite a ceasefire between government forces and the SPLA.