Thousands go hungry in Sudan’s Shilluk area: rebel
NAIROBI, May 11 (Reuters) – Thousands of people displaced by fighting between government forces and rebels in Sudan’s Upper Nile region face hunger and disease as the rainy season approaches, a top rebel said on Tuesday.
Lam Akol, a senior politician in the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), said government-sponsored militiamen had torched villages in the Shilluk Kingdom, home of the black African Shilluk people, uprooting thousands from their homes and killing 36 in March alone.
The United Nations estimates that up to 50,000 people have been driven from their homes in Shilluk since fighting began in March.
The area is meant to be covered by a ceasefire in a decades-old war in southern Sudan that ought to end in the next few weeks as the government and the SPLA conclude a peace deal.
Diplomats say the violations of the truce in Shilluk since March show how difficult it could be to implement any eventual peace deal in the south.
“It was the strategy of the government militias not only to burn the food crops but to torch the grass used in building huts,” Akol told a news conference on a visit to Nairobi. He said water lilies were the only edible plant left in the area.
“Exposed to both the heat and the cold, the population are living on water lilies. The condition of these displaced persons is miserable. They are staying in an area infested by mosquitoes.”
He said mosquito nets, plastic sheets, blankets cooking utensils, food and other items were urgently needed.
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 violence pits the army and militiamen loyal to the government in Khartoum against the SPLA, which has been fighting for greater autonomy from the Islamist government in the Arab north for over 20 years.
Akol said the SPLA had wrested control of the Shilluk areas of Papwojo chieftaincy, Fangak and Bahr el Jebel from government-backed militias this month, and he urged the United Nations and other relief groups to return to those places.
Political tensions worsened in Shilluk last October when Lam Akol angered some supporters by merging his Sudan People’s Liberation Army-United with the much larger main southern rebel movement, John Garang’s SPLA, more than 10 years after leaving.
Akol spent part of the 1990s as a government minister and part as a politician opposed to both Khartoum and the SPLA.
The conflict is separate from one in the westerly Darfur region, where more than 100,000 black Africans have been displaced and U.N. investigators have accused Sudanese troops and Arab militias of massive human rights violations.