UN envoy sees 9,000-strong south Sudan peace force

By Katie Nguyen

RUMBEK, Sudan, Jan 18 (Reuters) – The U.N. Security Council is expected to order nearly 10,000 troops to southern Sudan next month to monitor a deal ending a north-south civil war, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday.

Jan Pronk, the United Nations envoy to Sudan disembark from a U.N plane,Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005 during his arrival at Rumbek in southern Sudan. (AP). .

A peace agreement signed on Jan 9 by Sudan’s government and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) provides a role for international monitoring of the permanent ceasefire that ended Africa’s longest running conflict.

“I expect somewhere in the second week of February that the Security Council might give a mandate to the United Nations mission,” the U.N. special envoy to Sudan Jan Pronk told reporters on his first visit to the SPLA stronghold of Rumbek.

“What we’re going to propose is military observers, including protection forces, to be spread throughout south Sudan,” he said, adding that the total contingent would number between 9,000 and 10,000.

The deployment of the team, tasked with monitoring a ceasefire between government troops and SPLA fighters, would be completed within six months of the mandate being approved by the council, Pronk said.

He said the mission is expected to cost $100 million a year, but declined to say which countries would contribute soldiers to the force.

More than two decades of war in Sudan’s oil-producing south has killed 2 million people and forced millions more to flee their homes.

Often depicted as a conflict between the Arabic-speaking Islamist government and southern animist and Christian rebels seeking greater autonomy, the war has been complicated by oil, ethnicity and ideology.

The United Nations has appealed for $1.5 billion this year to tackle a separate war in the western Darfur region, and to fund emergency projects in the south. It is due to hold a donors’ conference for Sudan in Oslo in April.

Pronk was expected to leave for the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Wednesday to discuss the mandate for the proposed U.N.’s mission to Sudan with the 53-member African Union.