Persistent violence in Darfur threatens to derail south Sudan peace deal

RUMBEK, Sudan, Jan 20, 2005 (AP) — A tenuous agreement to end Africa’s longest-running civil war in southern Sudan brought international pledges to help rebuild the devastated region.

Sudanese in tribal clothes celebrates the peace treaty signed between Khartoum and SPLM in Nyala, in Sudan’s South Darfur region. (AFP).

But U.N. officials warn all of that could be derailed if a separate deadly conflict in the country’s western Darfur region persists.

“Peace is indivisible,” Jan Pronk, the U.N.’s chief envoy in Sudan , said Wednesday. “This is one country.”

Members of the southern Christian and animist African tribes who took up arms against the Arab Muslim-dominated north for greater autonomy and a share of the country’s wealth need to see a peace dividend, he said. But donors and investors won’t put money into the south if there is still violence in Darfur.

Friction between the Khartoum-based government and southern rebels over the handling of the Darfur crisis could also undermine a power-sharing administration that is supposed to take charge in six months, U.N. officials said.

Southern Sudan has been ravaged for 21 years by fighting between the government and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. More than 2 million people were killed – mainly through war-induced famine and disease – and 4 million fled their homes.

Hospitals, roads and schools were destroyed, homes and farms torched. Fertile farmland lies unattended after combatants sowed an estimated 5 million land mines.

“We need to build a new southern Sudan ,” Elija Makol, head of the rebels’ relief efforts said. “We are not talking about reconstruction, because there has never been much construction in the first place. We first need basic facilities like roads, schools, health services and resettling millions who fled their homes.”

Norway has agreed to host an international donor’s meeting later this year, but says it first wants to see progress resolving the crisis in Darfur. The U.S., which has promised hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, is also pressing for progress there.

Other countries have been more explicit in their threat to withhold aid.

“There is no way that we are going to release our taxpayers’ money to a government that is killing its own people,” said Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation Agnes van Ardenne, who arrived here Tuesday after meetings with government officials in Khartoum. Her country has pledged US$100 million ) in aid to Africa’s largest nation.

The Darfur crisis also threatens to undermine the difficult reconciliation process between north and south. Despite the signing of a Jan. 9 peace accord, giving the rebels 30% of seats in a transitional national government and autonomy in the south, residents here still instinctively refer to their northern compatriots as “the enemy.”