November 11, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — South Sudan could unilaterally split from the north because of a dispute over the oil-rich region of Abyei in Africa’s largest country, leading Islamist opposition party leader Hassan al-Turabi said on Sunday.
- Hassan al-Turabi
The former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) withdrew from government a month ago in protest over slow implementation of a landmark 2005 peace deal which ended Africa’s longest civil war.
Observers say the biggest obstacle to reconciliation is the unresolved status of Abyei, which is on the north-south border.
"I realise now that this is a very critical issue — it could risk something very serious for the whole deal," Turabi told Reuters in an interview. "It might provoke the south to proceed directly towards a proclamation of secession."
He said he was not surprised by the SPLM withdrawal from government but said southerners were partly to blame by focusing too much on the south at the expense of national politics, where they are the junior partner in a coalition government.
Turabi, who was President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s ideologue before a split in 1999-2000, said if borders were decided, Abyei should become a buffer zone, with free trade and movement and its oil revenues shared to avoid a return to civil war.
Both Bashir’s northern National Congress Party (NCP) and the SPLM could not agree on Abyei in negotiations and charged an arbitration by independent experts to define the borders. The NCP rejected the commissions findings.
Turabi said Abyei’s borders had been extended further north to include some Arab tribes and other populations. But he said any return to war would be frowned on by allies of both sides.
"They should arrange for something more amicable even before any proclamation (of independence)," he warned.
On a separate conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region, Turabi said Bashir still had not accepted a joint U.N.-African Union 26,000-strong peacekeeping force for the region the size of France and was finding new ways to hinder its deployment.
"The government now has a veto — actually it has stalled completely these international forces," Turabi said.
"Now he’s (Bashir) trying to use other ways to destroy the whole thing," he added, referring to the fact that Sudan has still not approved the list of troop contributing countries.
He was more hopeful on the political front, although he said the peace talks had to switch venue from Libya.
"If it’s a reasonable venue with reasonable attendance with observers not to just sit and watch but to try to mediate and reconcile ... it’s not that difficult," he said.
(Reuters)
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