Wash­ing­ton is host­ing lead­ers from South­ern and North­ern Sudan to try to nego­ti­ate peace in the coun­try. Rival ethic groups have warred in bloody clashes in recent months. The attacks include destroy­ing and steal­ing boats full of food aid meant for a rival tribe.

Try­ing to bro­ker any kind of peace will be dif­fi­cult. The con­flict is com­pli­cated by accu­sa­tions of some of the groups being armed by the Khar­toum gov­ern­ment. Mean­while, some fac­tions of the tribes have dis­armed while oth­ers took the oppor­tu­nity to gather more weapons, sug­gest­ing a lack of cohe­sive leadership.

From this IRIN arti­cle that we found at Reuters Alert­net, we find some back­ground about the armed con­flict in Sudan.

On 12 June, fight­ing broke out close to Nasir in Upper Nile State, South­ern Sudan, when hun­dreds of armed Jikany Nuer men attacked a flotilla of 31 boats, includ­ing 27 car­ry­ing grain and other sup­plies for the UN World Food Pro­gramme (WFP), accord­ing to UN offi­cials and eyewitnesses.

“The boats were car­ry­ing sup­plies to our enemy,” said Jikany youth Peter Gatwech, recov­er­ing from a bul­let wound to his stom­ach in Nasir hospital.

Dozens of peo­ple in Nasir said the attack on the boats was prompted after three other boats — thought to be car­ry­ing ammu­ni­tion or arms upstream to the Lou — joined the convoy.

The attack cut sup­plies to the more than 19,000 dis­placed Lou Nuer peo­ple in the eastern town of Akobo, who had fled ear­lier fight­ing against the Murele.

The river con­voy had to pass through Nasir — home of the Jikany Nuer peo­ple — and the lat­ter want revenge for an attack by Lou gun­men on 8 May that left 71 mainly women and chil­dren dead in the vil­lage of Torkech.

“They killed so many of us,” said Thiyang Gat­bel, a young Jikany girl shot in the arm dur­ing the night attack, and still recov­er­ing in hos­pi­tal. “We were sleep­ing out­side under mos­quito nets, and they sur­rounded the village.”

In May, the spe­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the UN Secretary-General and head of the UN Mis­sion in Sudan (UNMIS), Ashraf Qazi, warned that death rates in the south had out­num­bered those in the war-torn west­ern region of Darfur.

CPA needs bolstering

South­ern Sudan and the north must bol­ster efforts to imple­ment the 2005 Com­pre­hen­sive Peace Agree­ment (CPA) to ease ten­sions in the south and avoid pos­si­ble con­flict with the north, observers have warned.

“If this agree­ment fails, there is a risk that all of Sudan will go to war again,” said Melanie Teff of Refugees Inter­na­tional. “Every pos­si­ble step must be taken to pre­vent a return to the hor­rors of the past.”

The CPA ended 22 years of con­flict between north and south, and led to the estab­lish­ment of a semi-autonomous admin­is­tra­tion in South­ern Sudan.

“The dan­ger of vio­lence across South­ern Sudan could inten­sify in the months ahead,” the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a 21 June report. It warned of the “fail­ure of the gov­ern­ment of South­ern Sudan and the UN Mis­sion in Sudan (UNMIS) to pro­tect civilians”.

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