Sudan accuses Eritrea of threatening peace deal
By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS, June 18 (Reuters) – Sudan accused Eritrea on Friday of trying to derail a deal to end a two-decade civil war in southern Sudan and called on the U.N. Security Council to prevent its northeast African neighbor from succeeding.
Eritrea “has insisted on remaining an instrument of sabotage of peace in the Sudan, seeking to encourage, embrace, prepare and equip groups bent on disrupting its security and stability,” Sudan’s U.N. ambassador, Elfatih Erwa, said.
“We appeal to the council not to be unmindful of such activities and to take the necessary action to discourage and put a stop to them,” Erwa said in a statement prepared for the Security Council. He did not offer any specifics.
Erwa said he meant to read the statement to the 15-nation U.N. body last week, but the council rejected a request that he be allowed to address it.
The council was meeting to adopt a resolution authorizing a U.N. advance team to quickly assess peacekeeping needs in southern Sudan, where agreements reached earlier this month have paved the way for an end to Africa’s longest civil war.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan has named Jan Pronk, a former senior U.N. envoy and Dutch environment minister, to be his special representative to Sudan as a U.N. peacekeeping mission there shapes up, U.N. officials said on Friday.
Relations are poor between Sudan, a northeast African nation of some 35 million people about a quarter the size of the United States, and Eritrea, a small state of four million.
Bomb attacks in western Eritrea have become regular occurrences in recent months. The Eritrean government blames them on Islamic groups backed by the Sudanese government, which has consistently denied involvement.
Sudan has been mired in civil war for all but 11 of the 48 years since its independence from Britain in 1956.
The war in the south, a conflict between the Arab Muslim north and black animist or Christian south is fueled by religion, oil, and ethnic and political divisions. It erupted in 1983 and has killed more than 2 million people.
The Sudan government in Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed a collection of protocols in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi earlier this month as a prelude to a comprehensive peace deal expected to be nailed down within the next two months.