Residents of the central Abyei area are less than three months away from the scheduled start of a referendum on whether to join north or south Sudan, a vote promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north-south civil war.
North and south Sudan’s main political parties, who both claim the area, remain at loggerheads over how to organize the vote and analysts have warned growing tensions over the plebiscite could re-ignite conflict.
The latest round of negotiations between the parties, attended by US Sudan envoy Scott Gration, ended in Addis Ababa on Tuesday without agreement.
Leaders from the Misseriya, who regularly drive their livestock through Abyei, told journalists on Wednesday they could resolve disputes over the territory in a matter of days with direct talks with chiefs from Abyei’s Dinka Ngok tribe, without interference from politicians.
“What we need is for the SPLM (the south’s dominant Sudan People’s Liberation Movement) and the National Congress Party (the NCP - the ruling party in the north) to take their hands away,” Hussein Jalal-Aldin, deputy chairman of the Misseriya Forum, a tribal deliberative body, told Reuters.
“They (the political parties) have distorted everything. They have caused so many unnecessary problems. The people (of Abyei) were living amicably.”
Aldin said the Abyei dispute had been complicated by north- south competition over oil in the area — a subject that he said was of little interest to the Misseriya and Dinka who had found traditional ways of settling their land disputes for decades.
Aldin said he hoped the two groups would be left on their own to resolve the issue at the next round of talks, due to start in Addis Ababa at the end of the month.
“With direct talks we could resolve this issue in two days,” said senior Misseriya official Saddig Babo Nimr at a press conference in Khartoum.
The question of who gets to vote in the referendum remains one of the key sticking points. The Misseriya say they have as much right to vote in the plebiscite as the Dinka while SPLM leaders have insisted only settled Dinka and a handful of Misseriya should count as full time Abyei residents.
The Abyei vote is scheduled to take place on Jan. 9, 2011, the same day as southerners are due to vote on whether to stay part of Sudan or declare independence.
SPLM leaders have said southerners are likely to vote for independence while the NCP, headed by Sudan’s president Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, is campaigning for them to choose unity.
Bashir promised to step up development in the south in a speech in parliament on Tuesday, adding: “We hope that our brothers in the south will opt for unity, if given a just opportunity and left free to choose.”
