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2011-07-24 Africa Horn
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Warring Sudan Opposition Party Rejects Disarmament
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[An Nahar]  Leaders of Sudan's main opposition group, whose men are fighting government troops in South Kordofan, on Saturday rejected calls to disarm and said they would negotiate only via an outside third party.
The northern branch of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the ruling party of South Sudan, in a statement also accused the government of seeking to destroy north-south relations just two weeks after formal southern independence.
SPLM-north chairman Malik Agar, his deputy Abdelaziz al-Hilu and the party's secretary general Yasser Arman met in South Kordofan earlier this week for just the second time since the conflict there erupted on June 5.
"The meeting praised and valued... the refusal of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to be disarmed, in addition to the impressive victories achieved under the leadership of Comrade Abdulaziz al-Hilu," the group said.
For more than six weeks, heavy fighting
... as opposed to the more usual light or sporadic fighting...
including relentless air strikes has raged across South Kordofan between government troops and Nuba forces of Evil led by Hilu, who fought with the former rebel army of the south during its devastating 1983-2005 civil war with Khartoum.
An internal U.N. report seen by Agence La Belle France Presse said the conflict was triggered by the Sudanese army's insistence on expelling or forcefully disarming SPLA elements in the border state at the beginning of June.
The report also said the army's systematic attacks, targeting the region's indigenous Nuba peoples, could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, claims dismissed by Khartoum which insists it is fighting an internal rebellion.
Agar signed a framework agreement with top presidential aide Nafie Ali Nafie in Addis Ababa late last month that boosted hopes of a permanent political and security settlement for Blue Nile and South Kordofan, both northern states with a large number of SPLM supporters.
But President Omar al-Bashir
Head of the National Congress Party. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and eventually appointed himself president. Omar's peculiar talent lies in starting conflict. He has fallen out with his Islamic mentor, Hasan al-Turabi, tried to impose shariah on the Christian and animist south, resulting in its imminent secessesion, and attempted to Arabize Darfur by unleashing the barbaric Janjaweed on it. Sudan's potential prosperity has been pissed away in warfare that has left as many as 400,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. Omar has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court but nothing is expected to come of it.
dealt a blow to those hopes when he said three days later that he had ordered the army to cleanse South Kordofan of rebels.
A majority of National Congress Party (NCP) members also voted to reject the accord, in a sign of growing disunity within the north's ruling party.
"The leadership of the NCP takes full responsibility for what results from its rejection of the Addis Ababa framework agreement, especially its insistence on war as a means to resolve the dispute," the SPLM-north said.
"A peaceful negotiated solution remains the best option for the people of Sudan," it said, adding that the party would negotiate only through a third party and outside Sudan.
Separately, the SPLM-north accused the NCP of working to destroy the relationship between Juba and Khartoum by threatening to expel "millions" of southerners from the north and preventing food and fuel from reaching the south.
Earlier this week, Sudan's parliament adopted a law that cancels the Sudanese nationality of most southerners residing in the north, thought to number more than one million, leaving them without any legal basis to stay.
And in May, Khartoum restricted supplies of food and fuel to the resource-rich but landlocked and chronically underdeveloped south, forcing prices there to surge.
Bashir insists that he wants South Sudan to succeed, saying in a conciliatory speech at the independence ceremony in Juba on July 9 that "its success will be our success."
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Posted by Fred 2011-07-24 00:00||
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File under: Govt of Sudan
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Posted by Ulusotch Big Foot2328 2011-07-24 17:28||
2011-07-24 17:28||
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