Sudan Yet on the Brink

An official of South Sudan’s government says Sudan is in danger of witnessing another civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south unless the international community intervenes.

The National Congress Party, headed by President Omar al-Bashir, has repeatedly broken the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the country’s bloody two-decade-long civil war, reported Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, head of government of South Sudan Mission to the United States, to International Christian Concern.

As a result of the North’s failure, the delicate peace process is in danger of being derailed, he said.
“The role of the international community is to get in now and help us (the South and North Sudanese) to make sure that we work together to avoid war, to have peaceful disengagement and a fair election [and] put a lot of pressure on the NCP to end the war in Darfur,” Gatkuoth said.

Sudan is scheduled to hold its first national and presidential elections in April 2010. The elections will be the country’s first in 24 years. Then in January 2011, Sudan is slated to hold a referendum on whether South Sudan will secede from Sudan.

Gatkuoth said studies show that 98 percent of the people in Southern Sudan plan to vote for separation.
The elections and referendum are part of the 2005 Sudanese Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended one of Africa’s longest and bloodiest civil wars. The two-decade conflict between ethnic African southerners, who are mostly Christian and animist, and Sudan’s Arab-dominated government left an estimated two million people dead and tens of thousands of others displaced and wounded.

Hundreds of churches in Southern Sudan were also destroyed by Muslim militiamen from the north during the civil war.

In the five years that the CPA has existed, there has always been fear that the peace process would be derailed over disputes about the border between the north and south, the enactment of a national security law, and the April 2010 election, among other issues.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) last week noted that the NCP escalated the tension between the north and south by pushing through the National Assembly – a body the party controls – a Southern Sudan referendum bill with new language that the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement did not agree to. The SPLM is the primarily Christian political party that governs South Sudan.

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