Clashes rage in south Sudan despite truce – report
By Katie Nguyen
NAIROBI, Aug 2 (Reuters) – While the world is focused on Darfur, the main protagonists in Sudan’s civil war in the south have repeatedly violated a ceasefire, displaying a lack of trust that bodes ill for peace efforts, a security think-tank says.
The Khartoum government and Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) signed a cessation of hostilities accord in October 2002, meant to silence the guns in Africa’s longest-running civil war.
Some two million people have died as a result of the conflict in the oil-producing south since 1983, mostly from hunger and disease.
A formal peace deal ending 21 years of war is expected later this year, and with it a comprehensive ceasefire arrangement.
However, in the remote vastness of the south, little-noticed violence persists in Upper Nile in the Shilluk Kingdom, spawning widespread looting and cattle-raiding and forcing tens of thousands of civilians to flee in fear, according to the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS).
The United Nations has said 50,000 to 70,000 people have been displaced in Shilluk and the figure is growing.
“That nothing has been done about widespread breaches has encouraged disrespect for, and blatant flouting of, the agreement,” the ISS report said.
“This experience will inevitably cast a dark shadow over the impending ceasefire agreement”.
SPLA spokesman Samson Kwaje said the allegations were unfounded. Government officials in Khartoum were not immediately available for comment but an armed forces spokesman said any fighting was the result of local divisions between factions.
FACTIONS STILL ARMED
Under the 2002 cessation of hostilities agreement, the army and SPLA forces are obliged to maintain the positions they held at the signing of the truce.
The agreement makes no provision, however, for armed groups allied to either side. Sudan watchers say up to 30 groups excluded from the formal peace process are roaming the south, with independent estimates putting the total size of their forces between 6,000 and 30,000.
Neither did the accord anticipate the problems caused by shifting allegiances, which have resulted in clashes over control of territory and possession of cows.
Just three days after the truce came into effect the SPLA took the town of Akobo in Upper Nile from pro-government militias. Peace mediators issued no public denunciation.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, the parties to the agreement drew the appropriate conclusions and as a result the town has repeatedly passed from the control of the SPLA to the allies of the government and back again,” the report said.
“The danger in giving undue attention to the signing of a peace agreement is to buy into a misplaced optimism.”
Some of the worst fighting in the south broke out in Shilluk after a prominent leader of a local government-allied militia defected to the SPLA. The ISS said the government ferried members of a rival tribe on barges, sometimes escorted by gunboats, to fight the defectors and regain lost territory.
Sudanese armed forces spokesman Mohammed Bashir Suleiman denied Khartoum was fomenting conflict.
“The armed conflict that has flared up lately in Upper Nile state is a tribal conflict arising within the context of a conflict of interests between the factions present in the region,” he said.
The ISS said Khartoum was intent on perpetuating instability in the south ahead of a six-year transitional period, which is meant to end with a referendum in the south on secession.
“It (Khartoum) wants to make the area ungovernable for the incoming (SPLA) administrations,” the ISS said.
At stake are the south’s newly tapped oil fields — claimed by the SPLA — which produce much of the 300,000 barrels a day that earns Sudan in excess of $3 billion a year.
The ISS said a Verification Monitoring Team (VMT), a truce monitoring body that reports to regional mediators, has to follow cumbersome procedures that weaken its effectiveness.