Former southern rebels on Sunday accused Sudan’s president of ”threatening and calling for war” in speech he gave in honour of a government-allied militia charged with a string of atrocities.
Pagan Amum, Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), said he deplored the comments by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir at celebrations organised by the Popular Defence Forces (PDF) on Saturday.
In a belligerent televised speech, Al-Bashir raised the political temperature in a range of crises facing Africa’s biggest country and its neighbours and stoked a political stand-off between the SPLM and Khartoum.
Bashir called on the PDF ”to open training camps and to gather mujahedeen not for the sake of war but to be ready for anything” without going into further detail about their purpose.
The militia, which fought the SPLM during a two-decade civil war, was also accused of the mass abduction and rape of women and girls in Darfur, western Sudan, in a report published by the United Nations’ human rights office in August.
Bashir also said he would also not budge ”an inch” on the contested borders of the country’s oil-rich Abyei region, a key point of contention with the SPLM, which is based in the now semi-autonomous south under a peace accord.
He also accused the West of trying to ”restart the slave trade” by allowing aid groups to smuggle children out of Africa — a reference to the recent arrest of French aid workers accused of abducting children in Chad.
And he reiterated his right to exclude Western troops from a 26 000-strong UN/African Union peacekeeping force, due to start operating in Darfur next year.
Al-Bashir’s comments came at a turbulent time for the conflict in Sudan’s remote western Darfur region — and for relations between Khartoum and Sudan’s south.
Darfur peace talks, brokered by the African Union and the UN between Khartoum and Darfuri rebels have fizzled out after most insurgent groups boycotted the proceedings.
And the SPLM pulled its ministers out of the country’s coalition government last month, accusing Khartoum of stalling on the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed between both sides that ended Africa’s longest civil war.
In a statement handed to Reuters on Sunday, Amum said the SPLM was ”for peace and not for a return to war and deplored therefore the public statements threatening and calling for war by the NCP (Al-Bashir’s National Congress Party) leadership.”
Al-Bashir’s comments were also condemned by Darfur rebel leader Abdel Wahed Mohamed Ahmed al-Nur, the founder of Darfur’s Sudan Liberation Army, who as refused to take part in peace talks with Khartoum.
”We want to create a conducive atmosphere for negotiations. But [Al-] Bashir is doing exactly the opposite when he calls for these new militia camps,” he said.
”I am calling on the young people of Sudan not to go to these camps, unless they want to kill their fellow Sudanese or be killed.” – Reuters