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| Africa Horn |
| 10 southerners reported killed in new Sudan attack |
| 2011-01-12 |
| [Asharq al-Aswat] Arab primitives killed 10 people and maimed 18 as they attacked a bus carrying southern Sudanese traveling from the country's north to their home region, which is holding an independence referendum, an official said Tuesday. A leader of the Misseriya tribe, whose members are mostly nomadic cattle herders and which was blamed for the violence, denied there was an attack. The south's Minister of Internal Affairs Maj. Gen. Gier Chuang Aluong said the attack happened Monday in South Kordofan, north of Sudan's north-south divide. More than 140,000 southerners who have lived in the north have streamed back to the south since October -- initially in order to participate in the referendum though some are now fleeing out of fear of northern retribution. Southern Sudan's weeklong independence referendum began Sunday and is likely to split Sudan in two along its Arab-African faultline. The vote was part of a 2005 peace agreement that ended two decades of north-south civil war that killed 2 million people. Other attacks have been reported since Friday. The casualty figures have been in dispute, but it's possible that around 40 people have died. Southern officials have said that Misseriya on Sunday attacked police in the contested region of Abyei, killing 20. The tribe, for its part, accused police of killing 10 herders in about the same general area. The U.N. said it is "extremely concerned" about the reports of festivities in Abyei. Abyei, which holds oil deposits, had been promised its own self-determination vote, but now whether it remains part of Sudan or joins an independent south is to be decided in negotiations that so far have made little progress. |
| Posted by:Fred |