KHARTOUM, 26 October 2003 — The leader of a southern rebel faction announced yesterday that he was tearing up a decade-old peace agreement with the Sudanese government and rejoining his fighters in the bush.
Lam Akol, who heads a mainly Shilluk breakaway faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, accused the government of breaking the terms of the accord they struck in the town of Fashoda in 1993 by denying him permission to visit his fighters in areas of Upper Nile province they control.
By preventing me from visiting my forces, the government “has hammered the last nail in the coffin of the Fashoda agreement,” Akol said in a statement carried by most Khartoum dailies.
“I no longer have a place in this part of the country (northern Sudan),” said the longtime defector to the government cause, who served as transport minister until resigning from the ruling National Congress last year.
“The government has to bear the political and moral responsibility of what happened,” he said. Akol’s break with the government came as it was engaged in intensive talks in Kenya on a peace accord with the mainstream SPLA faction of John Garang to end the 20-year civil war in the south.
During a visit to the talks venue Wednesday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said he hoped to see a definitive agreement by December on the basis of a draft deal signed last year which foresees a referendum on independence for the mainly Christian and animist south after six years of autonomy. Akol broke with the Dinka SPLA leader in the early 1990s together with Nuer politician Riek Machar.
Akol, a chemical engineer, was a lecturer at Khartoum University and a leading member of the Sudan African Congress party when he defected to the SPLA in 1986.
In 1991, he split from the SPLA of Garang. In 1997, he signed the Fashoda peace agreement with the government and was appointed minister of transport in 1992.
In another incident, armed bandits spent an hour-and-a-half stopping buses and other vehicles on the Khartoum-Port Sudan highway Friday, beating up passengers and robbing them, before police arrived and gave chase, a police spokesman said.
The incident occurred at Amadam, north of Kassala city, where vehicles were stopped at gunpoint, and some later stolen, the statement said. Speaking on Omdurman Radio, Kassala Police Commissioner Maj. Gen. Abdin Tahir said the “gangsters” chose the timing to coincide with Muslim Friday prayers.
Reporting from Kassala, Sudan Media Center said the three pickup trucks seized were loaded with foodstuffs, gold pieces, clothes, perfumes, children’s bicycles, medicines and mobile telephones, as well as money. The gunmen fled toward the Telkouk area near the border with Eritrea.
