Seventeen civilians were killed and scores of others wounded when government warplanes bombed four villages in southern Sudan at the weekend, the region’s main rebel group claimed on Monday.
The attack was the second in the area in a week, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) charged in a statement. Eighteen people and more that 100 others were wounded in air raids on May 22, it added.
The SPLM/A said Antonov aircraft bombed the villages of Tam, Riboor, Chotot-ler and Norieh in the Western Upper Nile state on Friday, Saturday and Sunday despite Khartoum being party to an agreement committing it to protect civilians. The bombing raids could not be independently confirmed.
Khartoum at the weekend denied SPLA charges that it had bombed civilians in Rier village in the Western Upper Nile on May 22. The rebels accused the government of violating an agreement signed last March for the protection of civilians and civil infrastructures, brokered by US special envoy John Danforth.
“By constantly violating confidence building measures, the international community and particularly the US should no longer harbour any illusions about the GoS (government of Sudan) willingness to make peace,” the SPLA/M’s statement said.
It said Khartoum had taken advantage of Washington’s lack of clear policy on Sudan.
“The apparent lack of formulated US policy on the Sudan is an incentive for the regime to behave criminally and act to flout all agreements with impunity,” the SPLA/M charged. Southern Sudan has been ravaged by war and famine since 1983, when the mainly Christian and animist SPLA/M took up arms against the Arab and Muslim government in Khartoum.
The government has also been fighting northern groups who took up arms in 1995 in a conflict which has left between one million and 1,5-million people dead and four million people displaced. – AFP