Abyei “northern and will remain northern” – NCP official says

February 21, 2011 (KHARTOUM) – North Sudan has asserted that Abyei is “northern and will remain northern,” accusing south Sudan with which it contests the oil-producing region of intransigence over the issue.

Abyei region stands on the forefront of unresolved issues between north Sudan and the south, which voted last month to secede from the north in a referendum negotiated as part of a 2005’s peace deal that ended decades of civil war between the two sides.

The disputed region, which straddles the tentative 1965’s border strip between north and south Sudan, was due to hold another referendum last month but the vote was held hostage to political wrangling between the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) of north Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), which controls the south.

The main point of contention is eligibility to vote in the referendum. North Sudan wants the nomadic Arab tribe of Messriah, whose members traverse the borders into Abyei nine months a year to graze their cattle, to vote while the south insists that only the region’s indigenous tribe of Dinka Ngok has the right to vote.

A website affiliated with north Sudan’s security services, Sudan Media Center (SMC), on Monday carried statements in which the country’s Presidential Adviser for Security Affairs Salah Gosh declared that the Abyei is “northern and will remain northern” because “it lies within the northern side of the 1956’s border strip.”

Salah Gosh, who heads the NCP’s side of the north-south committee conducting negotiations on post-referendum issues, said that the joint committee had reached an understanding that the referendum on Abyei would not resolve the dispute.

Therefore, he added, they had agreed to negotiate on the basis of the sixth option proposed by the AU High-Level Panel on Sudan led by former South African President Thabo Mbeki.

The six option, which forms part of a package proposed by Mbeki’s committee, suggests that the area be divided between Messyrah and Dinka Ngok.

According to Gosh, the SPLM was resisting all solutions proposed to break the deadlock.

“We had proposed solutions that could have solved the problem but the SPLM complicated the problem and rejected the proposals,” he said.

The SPLM has long accused the NCP of procrastinating over Abyei in order to win concessions from the south in other areas of post-referendum issues.

(ST)