Students charge Sudan government is sabatoging peace accord
KHARTOUM, June 22, 2004 (dpa) — Sudanese students on Monday charged the government was sabotaging recently signed peace accords by preventing free movement of civilian groups that support the former rebels.
The charges were lodged by Wael Taha, a member of the Students’ Union Council at Sudan’s largest university, Khartoum University, and Kharaba Chan Deng, a member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), who spoke at the same news conference.
Much of the criticism was related to upcoming peace celebrations organized for Friday by John Garang, leader of southern rebels, in areas held by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), as the group is also known.
The activists said that SPLA supporters and sympathizers in Khartoum had been denied access to participate in the meetings organized by the rebels in the areas of the Blue Nile and Abyei.
In the Abyei area, SPLA supporters who were already there had been asked to leave the town within two hours. Deng said that a delegation comprised of intellectuals, community leaders, women and students had been ordered by the security to immediately leave the town, without delay.
Sudanese authorities had also on Monday prevented pro-rebel groups from leaving the town of Damazin in the Blue Nile area, they said.
The issue of the three contested areas still constitutes a threat to the peace agreement, the critics said.
The students on Monday declared their university campus an Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) liberated area because the government had forbidden them permission to participate in the SPLA conventions.
No comments were obtained from the government.
Taha called on the international community to intervene and restore freedom in Sudan.
Deng chided the government’s attitude toward people in the contested areas.
“This behaviour endangers the unity and territorial integrity of the Sudan,” he said, adding that it indicated that the government is working against peace.
Last month, the Sudanese government and the SPLM signed an internationally-brokered landmark agreement in Kenya that the first step to resolving decades of conflict in southern Sudan that has left an estimated 2 million people dead.
Under the agreement, Khartoum, which is situated in the Islamic north, was to be ruled by Sharia law, but non-Moslems were to be exempted from the religious law. The peace plan also laid out that oil revenues are to be shared equally between the two sides.
Sudan’s Christian and animist south can decide on secession from the Islamic government in Khartoum after a six-year interim period, under the agreement.
The long-sought peace accord has been overshadowed by brewing conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where an estimated 30,0000 people have died and one million have been displaced in an ethnic conflict.