KHARTOUM, 17 August 2005 — The former rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement withdrew in protest yesterday from a committee investigating deadly riots that erupted following the death of its leader John Garang in July. The SPLM, which signed a peace deal in January to end 21 years of north-south war, was angered by a police raid on a refugee camp outside the capital that is home to thousands of fellow southerners.
Police surrounded Mayo camp, searching houses and arresting residents, SPLM officials said. Interior Ministry officials declined immediate comment on the operation. In protest, the SPLM has withdrawn from the committee investigating the riots which swept Khartoum after the death of Garang, the architect of the peace deal, in a helicopter crash on July 31, said Deng Goc, a senior SPLM official in Khartoum.
President Omar Bashir formed the committee after the clashes, the worst seen in decades in the capital, claimed more than 100 lives and polarized Khartoum’s north and south communities. “We think the authorities are doing this for political reasons,” Goc said. “They want to push out the SPLM and make us look bad in front of the Sudanese people because we are now in government with them.” The SPLM was also boycotting a joint security committee for the state of Khartoum, Goc added.
Under a peace deal in January, the SPLM returned to Khartoum and its new leader, Salva Kiir, was sworn in as first vice president last week. It is in talks to form a new coalition government within the coming weeks. Mayo camp, about 16 km outside Khartoum, houses tens of thousands of southerners and Sudanese who fled fighting in the western Darfur region.
Goc, who was the internal head of the SPLM before it returned in force to Khartoum in July, said Kiir would meet Bashir later on Tuesday to discuss the raids. The government has demolished houses in Mayo in the past, saying it wants to move residents to more planned housing further outside the capital.
But residents say they cannot move further out because there is no running water and electricity and transport to the capital, where many of them work, is too expensive.
The January peace deal envisages wealth and power sharing, democratic transformation and a southern referendum on secession within six years. It ended Africa’s longest civil war in Sudan’s south, which claimed 2 million lives, mostly from hunger and disease.
Meanwhile, heavy rains have damaged a dam and caused flooding that has left thousands of people without shelter in the capital of North Darfur state and a nearby camp for displaced people, government officials said Monday. The rainfall from Friday morning to Saturday collapsed part of the Haloof Dam, some 13 kilometers northeast of El-Fasher, and sent meter-high waters sweeping through the area.
An official at the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs said some 2,284 families lost their makeshift shelters in Abu Shouk camp, according to a preliminary report.
In El-Fasher, seven neighborhoods were leveled and some 547 families left homeless, 12 schools were destroyed and the central market was heavily damaged, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has yet to be released. No casualties were reported.
“The situation has now been brought under control and the government has exercised tremendous efforts, distributing canvas and blankets and sorghum to the affected families,” Gov. Osman Mohamed Yusuf Kibir said. He said over 2,200 sacks of sorghum had been handed out.
