Sudan militia attack former southern rebels-SPLA

By Opheera McDoom

RUMBEK, Sudan, March 5 (Reuters) – Southern Sudanese rebels said militia fighters allied to the northern Khartoum government had attacked them despite a peace deal supposed to end Africa’s longest war.

In the left, leaders of pro-governmental southern militia in the uniform of Sudanese army during the celebration of the Sudan peace agreement last January 2005 in Nairobi. (Sudan Tribune)

The attacks over the last three weeks on positions held by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the southeastern area of Acobo could undermine the peace agreement, SPLA chief commander Salva K)ir Mayardit told Reuters late on Friday.

The Khartoum government and the SPLA signed a comprehensive peace deal in Kenya in January to end two decades of civil war in the south that pitted the Islamist government against the mainly pagan and Christian south.

“We know it (the militia attacks) is the program of the government of Sudan because … They are getting logistics from the government of Sudan,” he said. “The SPLA is fighting in self-defense.

“They ara very serious and that can undermine the peace agreement itself because you cannot talk about peace when you are fighting on the other side,” he said.

Militias were also preparing to attack other SPLA positions in the southeast, Kiir said. He urged the government to take control of the militias and stop their activities.

Acobo is an area of tension between ethnic Dinkas who dominate the SPLA and ethnic Nuers and has changed hands several times in the past three weeks.

U.N. aid chief Jan Egeland said on Saturday the area had become a no-go area in the south for the United Nations.

“This (fighting) shows the fragility of the peace process and it shows a need for the U.N. peace mission and forces,” Egeland said. “The fighting has been very severe but it could also be contained very easily.”

The southern civil war, which was complicated by issues of oil ethnicity and ideology, claimed more than 2 million lives and forced more than 4 million from their homes.

The SPLA’s humanitarian commissioner Elijah Malok said the recent fighting had displaced 250,000 people, though international aid officials said that figure appeared high.

AID SLOW IN COMING

Kiir urged donors to come forward with pledges and said the international community was not moving quickly enough to support civilians returnin’ to the south.

“We are not satisfied with the way things are moving. There is looming disaster in southern Sudan — they (the international community) are not moving fast enough.”

“There are not really preparations that have been made by the U.N. … because the donors have not released the new money,” said the ethnic Dinka commander.

Malok said 1.7 million internally displaced southerners had returned to the south and they had no access to food, water or healthcare in the war-ravaged country.

Plans to deploy troops from Jordan and Malaysia as part of a force of 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers to monitor the ceasefire w%re unacceptable to the SPLA and had been dropped, Kiir said.

Troops from Egypt, India, Zambia, Bangladesh, Nepal and Kenya had been accepted but the force should come with a full peacekeeping mandate rather than one simply to monitor the ceasefire, he added.

The SPLA would prefer separate U.N. resolutions on south Sudan and a conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region, rather than the comprehensive one being debated, he said.