At least 50 000 people have been forced to flee their homes in southern Sudan because of militia attacks and fighting between Sudanese government and rebel forces, the United Nations said.
The clashes over the past few weeks have occurred despite an October 2002 cease-fire between the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and despite a nearly two-year peace process aimed at ending the 21-year-old civil war.
Since early March, the United Nations has received reports of villages, schools and health clinic being destroyed and looted, as well as incidents of rape in Shilluk Kingdom, in the northern Upper Nile region, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan said in a statement on Sunday.
Most of the attacks have been carried out by militia opposing the rebels, said Ben Parker, a United Nations spokesperson.
”The most serious fighting that has affected civilians have been from militia targetting civilian settlements,” Parker said by telephone from Sudan. ”Fighting between government troops and SPLA is a much smaller element in the conflict as far as we know.”
UN agencies and aid groups have been forced to suspend operations in the area because of the violence.
Yasir Arman, a spokesperson for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, accused the militia of carrying out the attacks with government support.
He said the area is a stronghold of an allied rebel group, which joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army after its leader, Lam Akol, defected from the government.
Ad’ Dirdeiry Hamed, Sudan’s deputy ambassador to Kenya, said no government troops were involved in the fighting. He said the clashes pitted rival groups of a southern faction against each other.
Sudan’s civil war erupted in 1983 when rebels from the mainly animist and Christian south took up arms against the predominantly Muslim and Arab north.
More than two-million people have perished in Africa’s longest-running conflict , mainly through war-induced famine, but fighting has slowed since the warring parties began peace talks in July 2002.
Negotiations, which are taking place in Kenya, are nearing their conclusion but are currently deadlocked on key outstanding issues.
These include whether Khartoum, the capital, should be governed under Islamic law and the details of power-sharing for two disputed areas in central Sudan. – Sapa-AP