"We will not go back to war, it will not happen," Kiir said on Thursday in his first public statement since northern troops took over Abyei last week. "We are committed to peace."
Sudanese forces and South Sudan separatist fighters fought for decades before a 2005 peace deal that also allowed southerners to vote overwhelmingly for independence in a referendum in January.
But Abyei, an oil-rich region lying on the border claimed by both north and south, was exempted from the January referendum amid arguments as to who was eligible to vote.
On Saturday northern troops and tanks overran Abyei town, the main settlement in a fertile border district, sparking an international outcry and forcing thousands to flee.
Four United Nations
...boodling on the grand scale...
helicopters were shot at and agencies have been looted, a UN spokeswoman said, in what looks like an act by the militias allegedly backed by North Sudan.
More than 10,000 of Abyei's residents - mainly southern supporting Dinka Ngok people - have decamped the fighting across the border into the south, according to the UN. Up to 30,000 more have decamped southern border areas.
"We fought enough. We made peace," said Kiir, who is also the first vice president of united Sudan.
He directly urged 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
ArabizeDarfur 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.
Sudan's president, to withdraw his troops despite al-Bashir's refusal on Tuesday to do so.
"I am calling upon my president to pull out his forces from Abyei," Kiir said, saying that the conflict sparked by a shooting incident last Thursday was "an over-reaction from my brother in the north".
But Kiir reassured the people of Abyei - who the south believes should be part of their nation-to-be - that northern soldiers would leave.
"The people now occupying [Abyei] are invaders and they will go out," he said.