KHARTOUM, 26 March 2005 — Sudan’s former southern rebels yesterday welcomed a UN decision to send 10,000 peacekeepers to secure the peace accord they signed in January with Khartoum but contentious issues remain before the force is deployed.
“We are very happy with the resolution ... but we are now going to have to work out all the details,” Sudan People’s Liberation Army spokesman Samson Kwaje told AFP. There was no immediate reaction from the Sudanese government.
The UN Security Council on Thursday approved the deployment of 10,000 UN peacekeepers to shore up the Jan. 9 peace agreement which put an end to the 21-year-old north-south civil war in Sudan, Africa’s largest country. “We still have to look at the specific number of troops. There could be more, there could be less. Then there is the issue of the exact shape of the deployment and that of the nationalities involved,” Kwaje said.
“We are not happy with the present composition of the force,” he stressed, in reference to countries considered by the rebels to be too close to the Khartoum government. Among the countries which have expressed interest in sending troops are China, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Rwanda, Japan and Germany.
The United Nations had said it would seek to achieve a balance between Islamic and non-Islamic countries, but rebel leaders also voiced concern over the presence of peacekeepers from countries such as China and Malaysia. Both countries have large shares of Sudan’s lucrative oil industry and SPLA leader John Garang warned in January that their presence in the UN force could threaten its neutrality.
Addressing the Security Council on Thursday, the head of UN peacekeeping operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, welcomed the move but also admitted “serious political hurdles” still confront the peace process in Sudan. The peacekeeping force will be called United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) and consist of around 10,000 personnel and an additional 715-strong police force. The UNMIS deployment will also face serious logistical impediments.
The road network is almost nonexistent, there are very few usable runways and other vital infrastructure has been left in tatters by the war in southern Sudan, a land-locked territory home to some six million inhabitants.
The force, to be deployed in southern Sudan, is not charged with direct intervention in Darfur, where an estimated 180,000 people have died and 1.8 million been displaced in more than two years of conflict that worsened a dire humanitarian situation.
Officials and commentators warned that if a political solution was not found rapidly to contain the situation in Darfur, violence risked spilling over to the south and jeopardizing the fledgling peace accord.
Meanwhile, Sudanese authorities in cooperation with the US Embassy have launched an investigation into an incident in which a USAID worker was shot and wounded in the troubled Darfur region, a senior official said yesterday.
Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid, quoted by the independent Akhbar Al-Youm daily, said a probe had been launched into Tuesday’s incident and blamed rebel movements for the attack.
A woman working for the US Agency for International Development was wounded while traveling in a humanitarian convoy traveling on a road which was supposed to be safe. US officials said the woman, an information officer whose named was withheld, was shot in the face but her wounds were not life-threatening.
“The government is sure it was the rebels who attacked the USAID convoy,” said Hamid, explaining that the attack took place in an area where rebels had repeated violated security protocols.
Following the attack, the United Nations on Wednesday declared that the Kass-Nyala road where the attack occurred in South Darfur state was closed to UN staff until further notice.
