Southern Sudan will break away from the north and become the world’s newest nation on July 9. A 2005 peace accord ended a decades-long civil war, but northern troops over the last several weeks have attacked pro-southern communities along the north-south border.
Despite the attacks, the south is lobbying for a lifting of sanctions on the north, because of the economic benefits the south would also receive.
Vice President Riek Machar returned from a three-week trip to the US on Wednesday, where he said he discussed the future of the American sanctions with the US government and with ambassadors to the UN Security Council.
“We rely in Southern Sudan on oil revenues,” said Machar. “According to the American sanctions on the whole Sudan, oil is a sanctioned commodity.”
The majority of Sudan’s oil is in the south, but the south’s only means to export the oil is through pipelines that run through the north, to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
Machar said his delegation lobbied the Obama administration to review and “preferably” lift sanctions on the entire country, arguing that if US sanctions continue after Sudan splits in two, the oil-dependent southern economy will suffer. Machar said his delegation received US assurances that it would review the sanctions.
The US government first imposed sanctions on President Omar Bashir’s Khartoum government in 1997. The order prohibited US importation of Sudanese items and goods and prevented the export of all US goods to Sudan except for humanitarian supplies.
Bashir said in a speech in Port Sudan on June 22 that he would block the south’s access to the pipelines unless a favorable wealth-sharing agreement was reached.
The north and south have been negotiating for months over wealth-sharing, but no agreements have yet been reached.
Meanwhile, a senior UN official said on Wednesday that some 1,400 civilians have been killed in southern Sudan this year, many by ill-disciplined former rebels incorporated into the security forces before its secession.
Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kyung-wha Kang told reporters that to halt such mayhem it was vital for the police and army of the new state to be trained and for their work to be observed by human rights monitors.
“Our information is that at least 1,400 civilians have been killed in south Sudan this year alone,” said Kang, who has just returned from a visit there. South Sudan is due to become independent from the north on July 9.
“There is a lot of internal conflict over cattle and cattle-rustling, but there is also a great deal of violence by the SPLA,” she said, referring to the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army of the former rebels against Northern rule.
“Former combatants are being integrated into the army and police without discipline ... This is a very ill-disciplined military,” Kang, a national of South Korea, told a news conference.
She said a major training effort was needed by the international community as well as by the new government.
“There is a tremendous need for the basic infrastructure for a functioning state which is just not there after many years of civil war,” Kang added.
She said she hoped that a UN military peacekeeping force being put together for the disputed Abyei border region would have with it a strong contingent of human rights experts who would be able to monitor the situation anywhere in the country.
Clashes along the ill-defined border have raised fears of a return to the all-out north-south civil war that killed more than 2 million people over decades until 2005.
