Sudan pushed to pull troops from Abyei

The head of United Nations peacekeeping has urged Sudan and South Sudan to withdraw their troops from the disputed Abyei region.

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New York - The new head of United Nations peacekeeping on Thursday urged Sudan and South Sudan to withdraw their troops from the disputed Abyei region as Western diplomats warned that the situation on their border was increasingly tense.

Last month a Sudanese army spokesman said Khartoum would not withdraw its army from Abyei by the end of September as expected by the United Nations, eliciting sharp criticism from its former civil war foe South Sudan.

“The parties (Sudan and South Sudan) must redouble their commitments to withdraw their armed forces, establish joint administration and allow recovery and reconciliation efforts in Abyei to begin,” the new UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told the UN Security Council.

Sudan's army took Abyei in May in a show of force that triggered an exodus of more than 100 000 civilians after the southern army attacked an army convoy.

South Sudan's acting UN envoy David Buom Choat told the council South Sudan's army has already withdrawn from Abyei in compliance with a June agreement signed in Addis Ababa.

In a September 29 report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had chided the north and the south for not pulling their troops out of Abyei as previously agreed.

Choat said the UN force commander for the Ethiopian UN peacekeeping mission in Abyei, UNISFA, had since “confirmed that SPLA forces have complied with the agreed withdrawal plan”.

There was no immediate confirmation of Choat's remarks. Choat added that the northern army “must now withdraw unconditionally from Abyei area”.

South Sudan seceded from the north in July after a January referendum agreed under a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war that killed more than two million people. Such a vote was originally also planned in Abyei but was never held as both sides have been unable to agree on who can participate.

Khartoum's UN Ambassador Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman reiterated that northern troops would only leave Abyei once UNISFA has reached its full deployment of 4 000 Ethiopian troops. Just under half that number have been deployed.

“They will not stay ad infinitum in Abyei,” he said. “However, the withdrawal we meant was that it should be organised in concurrence with the completion of the deployment of the Ethiopian forces to avoid a security vacuum.”

South Sudan has accused the north of trying to prevent civilians returning to the region, which contains fertile grazing land, as well as small oil reserves.

Several Western diplomats said Khartoum was making it difficult for UNISFA to reach full deployment, partly due to its slow issuance of visas. Ladsous touched on those difficulties in his speech to the Security Council.

“There is delay in the issuance of visas and other documents,” he said. “We continue to work with these problems to deploy another 900 troops by the end of October.”

Ladsous also complained about difficulties with flight authorisations. A delayed flight authorisation led to the death of three injured Ethiopian troops in August because they could not be transferred to hospital in time, UN officials say.

Ladsous said he wanted to reconfigure UNISFA slightly to include monitoring of the north-south border, a plan Osman praised as a “positive development.”

Ladsous also said he needs four helicopters and two fixed-wing reconnaissance planes.

Several Western diplomats said privately that the Security Council was concerned about the worsening situation in Sudan, above all the growing tensions between the north and south and the deteriorating situation in the western Darfur region.

They said the five permanent council members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - want to focus more attention on Sudan, where roughly one third of all UN peacekeepers have been deployed in the north and the south. - Reuters

Source: http://www.iol.co.za/sudan-pushed-to-pull-troops-from-abyei-1.1152289

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