OWN CORRESPONDENT and AFP, Khartoum | Monday
SUDAN has accused the United States of “being one of the main reasons” behind the civil war in south Sudan by supporting and assisting the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).
“The US provides one of the main reasons behind the suffering of the people in the south, the continuation of fighting and aggravation of the humanitarian situation by encouraging the rebel (SPLA) leader John Garang to reject the proposed peace initiatives,” Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said in the independent Al-Sahafi Al-Dawli newspaper.
The US “openly sides with the rebel movement and offers it political and military assistance”, said Ismail, who strongly denied US accusations that Khartoum is continuing to bomb civilian targets in southern Sudan as part of its 17-year-old civil war with the rebels.
“The American administration repeats allegations by the rebel movement without bothering to verify them,” Ismail said in response to the accusations, made by US State Department spokesman Philip Reeker.
He ridiculed Reeker as “having become an official spokesman for the rebel movement, repeating what it says without verification”.
Ismail denied bombing civilian targets, saying the SPLA was guilty of using humanitarian relief sites as “shields of protection.”
He denied that the government targets relief workers in south Sudan, arguing that “not a single relief worker has ever been killed or wounded by the government, while the rebel movement’s record is full of murdering, abducting and beating operations of the relief workers.”
Meanwhile, presidential advisor Ahmed Ibrahim al-Tahir dismissed a report in the Khartoum press that the US had proposed a peace deal between north and south, he said.
“We have not received any such initiative from the US administration,” Tahir was quoted as saying, though he added that there was a “mounting interest within the US about Sudan.”