Sudan president warns of greater conflict with south

Sudan’s president accused former southern rebels of going back on the terms of a peace deal, warning that conflict could re-erupt if the sides did not settle disputes before a referendum on secession.

The comments from President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, reported on state media, raised the stakes in a war of words between Khartoum and the south’s dominant Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), five years after the sides ended decades of civil war with an accord.

In three months time, that peace deal is supposed to come to a climax with a referendum giving the people of the oil-producing south the right to decide whether to declare independence or stay part of Sudan.

Making unity ‘attractive’
Al-Bashir told a conference in Sirte, Libya he regretted the fact that SPLM leader and south Sudan president Salva Kiir had recently publicly come out for separation. This was against the terms of the 2005 peace deal which said both northerners and southerners should try to make unity “attractive” to southerners before the vote, Suna news agency reported.

Al-Bashir said he was still committed to holding the vote but both sides first had to settle differences over the position of their shared border and how to share out oil, debt and Nile River water.

“He [al-Bashir] warned that the failure in the settlement of these issues before the referendum would make the process as a project for a new dispute between the north and the south that can be much [more] serious than the dispute which was existing before the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement),” said Suna, reporting on the speech which al-Bashir gave on Saturday.