Political battle looms in Sudan
2008-04-02 15:33
Abyei - Troop numbers are building and the threat of war looms over Abyei, a dusty, oil-rich crossroads where Sudan's north and south are being sucked into a political battle that could unhinge peace.
The district and its town of mud huts and flimsy market shacks are a teeming maze of overlapping tribal and political loyalties laced with fear and tension, where humanitarian vehicles and motorbikes hurtle down dirt tracks.
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.
The southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in turn is losing patience with what it sees as the failure of President Omar al-Beshir's National Congress Party (NCP) to implement a protocol for governing this oil-rich zone during a transition period.
Stirring up old tensions
The protocol, which helped end the two-decade civil war, stipulates that the joint presidency of Beshir, First Vice President and south Sudan leader Salva Kiir and Vice President Ali Osman Taha, a northerner, appoint Abyei's administrator.
But last week, southerner Edward Leno arrived with a planeload of supporters and five "cabinet secretaries" as local SPLM chairman and to supervise local administration with limited funds from south Sudan, party leaders say.
"This is a violation. No one is allowed to make a decision without it being adopted by the presidency," Kamal Obeid, information secretary for Beshir's party, told AFP.
Dressed immaculately at the head of a conference table filling a pre-fabricated office on the SPLM compound, Leno says avoiding war between the rival ethnic groups dominates "almost every aspect of my work."
The Sudanese military, however, accuses him of stirring up old tensions between the Ngok Dinka, who supported the SPLM against the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum, and the Arab Messeria tribe, who fought in a pro-government militia.
SPLA forces are mobilising
"The Dinka want to have a separate administration that excludes the Messeria. This is wrong because we are sharing grass, water and land," said the NCP representative Zacharia Atem Piyin.
As a guest speaker at a rally in Leno's honour, Zacharia insisted the land belonged to both peoples, triggering raucous laughter in the VIP tent where SPLM officials good-naturedly shook their heads.
Concern over the issue was underscored on Monday when Foreign Minister Deng Alor, a top member of the SPLM, opted out of the opening session of South African-chaired talks on Sudan's reconstruction - to hold separate talks about Abyei with Kiir elsewhere in Khartoum.
On the ground, army-sponsored militia and SPLA forces are mobilising in the arid scrubland north of town, making the area ever more dangerous and hampering UN humanitarian assistance.