KHARTOUM, 12 October 2004 — Sudan has accused Uganda of supplying the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army with heavy weaponry to step up the pressure on Khartoum which is already bogged down with the crisis in Darfur, a media report said yesterday. The semi-governmental Sudanese Media Center quoted officials as charging that the government of Uganda had shipped weapons across the border and into SPLA-controlled areas in southern Sudan last week.
“Kampala has provided these weapons so that the SPLA could (launch) an attack against the Sudanese army” which would coincide with an offensive by the two main rebels groups in the western Darfur provinces, the report said.
There was no official confirmation but the report comes as the latest in years of mutual accusations by Khartoum and Kampala that each supports and arms the other’s opposition groups. Khartoum has been repeatedly accused of assisting the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel Ugandan organization which has been waging for almost two decades a brutal war from northern Uganda and sanctuaries in southern Sudan.
Meanwhile, the alleged ringleader of an anti-government plot has fled Sudan, a senior official from his Popular Congress party said yesterday, after the authorities had spent weeks searching Khartoum for him. “Dr. Hajj Adam Yusef, a member of the party’s political bureau who has been hunted since March by the Sudanese government, managed to leave the country recently,” the Islamist party’s No. 2, Ali Al-Hajj, told AFP by phone from Germany.
