A plane crashed in Sudan on Monday after taking off from Khartoum, killing four crew members. It is the fourth plane crash in Sudan in two months.
UN diplomats trying to solve the conflict in Darfur must better address the proxy war between Chad and Sudan, analysts say.
The World Food Programme says food cuts in Darfur are a forced necessity.
Up to 90 000 people could be displaced by fighting in Sudan’s bitterly contested oil region of Abyei where the United Nations is racing against time to provide aid relief and prevent a return to civil war. Two rounds of heavy fighting between government soldiers and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army have largely obliterated Abyei’s once bustling main town.
Sudan on Tuesday shut down for its first census in 15 years, a milestone in the peace deal that ended Africa’s longest civil war but clouded in dispute threatening to undermine the accord further. The two-week census is crucial to prepare constituencies for national elections.
Formerly warring north and south Sudan were at loggerheads on Sunday as the south pulled out of a national census, a cornerstone of their fragile peace agreement, citing a barrage of grievances. ”We have deferred the census until sometime this year,” the information minister in the southern government confirmed.
Gunmen have attacked police from the African Union and United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur for the first time, injuring one officer by beating him with a rifle butt, a UN spokesperson said on Thursday. The unarmed police were stopped at gunpoint as they returned from a routine patrol.
Troop numbers are building and the threat of war looms over Abyei in Sudan. Khartoum’s two ruling coalition partners are at loggerheads over what the mainly Muslim north interprets as the rival Christian and animist south’s unilateral dispatch of one of its own to administer the area, without presidential approval.
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/ 26 February 2008
The deadly conflict in Darfur entered its sixth year on Tuesday with no solution in sight, as Khartoum continued to resist the full deployment of a peacekeeping force amid a fresh wave of bombings. The anniversary coincides with visits to the country by Washington’s special envoy for Sudan, Richard Williamson, and China’s point man for Darfur, Liu Giujin, for top-level talks.
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/ 21 December 2007
Hotels booked, parties planned and lights glittering, Bethlehem is preparing for tens of thousands of pilgrims to overcome Israeli occupation and give the town the best Christmas in years. ”We are hopeful this city will remain peaceful. I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful Christmas,” says mayor Victor Batarseh, determined to look on the bright side sitting next to a plastic fir tree near Manger Square.