Sudan’s Beja opposition demands more power
By Ed Harris
ASMARA, Feb 6 (Reuters) – An opposition group from Sudan’s increasingly unstable east called on Sunday for more power and resources for the impoverished region, echoing demands made by other anti-Khartoum forces in Africa’s largest country.
Last month, police killed at least 20 ethnic Beja when they opened fire in Port Sudan on protesters preparing for a march to demand that the Khartoum government start negotiations on sharing power and the country’s resources.
Ali El-Safi, an official of the opposition Beja Congress, added in an interview that the movement rejected a recent pact on Sudan’s future reached with Khartoum by an alliance of opposition groups of which it is a member, arguing it does not tackle the east’s problems.
“We need our share of power and wealth. We need a federal state. That is, we need to solve our problems by ourselves,” Safi told Reuters at a meeting in neighbouring Eritrea of Sudan’s opposition umbrella National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
“Then there are grievances of development. We are a backwater in the East, so we need to allocate resources to address these problems,” he added.
Originally a nomadic people, many moved to the port to work as labourers after famine killed their cattle and mechanised farming took over their lands in the 1980s.
The Beja Congress, which has a military wing that has carried out minor military operations in the east, and other Sudanese opposition groups accuse the government of neglecting the remote regions of the country in favour of the centre.
They see an accord signed in January between the government and the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) as a model for their own regions. The agreement gives the southerners a share of their region’s oil revenues.
The NDA was a serious challenge to Khartoum in the 1990s, when it launched a military campaign into the east from Eritrea. The alliance says it still has thousands of fighters under arms.
Apart from the SPLM, the other main group in the NDA is the Democratic Unionist Party, one of the big traditional parties in the Arab north. Other members include the Sudanese Communist Party, the Baath Party, the Beja Congress, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) from Darfur in the west and an alliance of southern parties independent of the SPLM.
The government and NDA reached a tentative agreement in Cairo on January 16 on Sudan’s political future that builds on a peace accord already signed with the SPLM.
The power-sharing deal struck by Khartoum and the SPLM allocates a proportion of seats in a new national government to other parties, and the Cairo accordpaves the way for talks on how to divide up those seats and how to integrate opposition armed forces into the national army.
But Safi said the Beja Congress rejected the pact.
“Our stance is clear. We refused the Cairo agreement because it doesn’t address the Eastern problem,” he said. “The substance is not convincing, a very superficial tackling of the problem.”
NDA negotiators are due to fly to Cairo on Friday for further talks with the Khartoum government to build on the Cairo pact. Safi said the Beja Congress should be the sole negotiator for the NDA when the east is discussed at the Cairo talks.