Soldiers caught up in fighting in Sudan’s oil town of Abyei have agreed to pull out of the settlement to ease tensions, local officials and UN officers said on Sunday.
One soldier was killed after shooting broke out on Friday between troops and police in the disputed town, where clashes between northern and southern Sudanese forces in May raised fears for a peace deal.
Both north Sudan and the semi-autonomous south claim Abyei – at stake is control over nearby oilfields and a key pipeline funnelling crude to Sudan’s Red Sea coast.
The boundaries of the town and surrounding territory were left undecided in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended more than two decades of north-south civil war.
A UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity said Friday’s fighting had “knocked people’s confidence badly”.
“We think 8 000 or 9 000 have left the town,” said Abyei’s secretary for public utilities Juac Agok, part of a temporary north-south administration set up under the same roadmap agreement.
“In itself it was a small incident. But it has caused a lot of tensions because of what happened in May,” he told Reuters in a phone interview.
In May, scores were killed and more than 50 000 left homeless when northern and southern armies fought in the town, burning the settlement to the ground.
Both sides pulled their troops out of the town after the clashes, and agreed to replace them with joint police and military units made up of northerners and southerners, as part of a road map peace agreement.
Agok and the UN officer said commanders of the joint military unit had agreed to pull out to a camp outside the settlement in the next seven days, leaving the integrated police unit in charge.
“When people clash, it is better to separate them… to minimise the chance of further clashes,” said Agok.
They said there would be an investigation into what sparked Friday’s shooting.
Police told Reuters the shooting started after a northern soldier in the joint military unit got into an argument with a trader in the town’s market and police tried to intervene.
A UN official said nine people were also hurt in the fighting, four of them soldiers, two police and three civilians.
The origins of the May clashes are still unclear. Observers said it may have been sparked by a similarly small incident, reportedly a confrontation between northern and southern forces at a checkpoint.
June’s Abyei roadmap deal agreed to refer the issue of Abyei’s disputed borders the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague
1 response so far ↓
Drake Smith // December 15, 2008 at 4:52 pm |
My concern with the latest developments of violence and initiantives from the North such as the new “Peace Road” are they are positioning themselves for the vote in 2011. Since the majority of the oil and resources are in the South my gut feeling is that it will only get worse. I have posted an article on my blog, http://www.speakingforsudan.blogspot.com/ that describes a new road being put in Sudan to connect the entire country with its neighbors. On the surface this seems like a wonderful idea, my fear is that that if you look into it deeper it is being financed by China and Saudi Arabia. Both I believe looking to exploit the oil rich South. I hope that my opinions and feelings are wrong. I have been to Malakal Sudan and spent time with the wonderful people there. As a follower of Jesus Christ it is my duty to draw awareness to what is going on.
Drake