Church leaders urge probe into violence in Upper Nile

The All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) called on Thursday for an investigation into what it said were "reports of crimes against humanity" in southern Sudan's Upper Nile state. It said attacks by armed militias had led to the displacement of 150,000 people. "While the graphic media reports have caused all of us, the world over to focus attention primarily on the Darfur, we were informed that militias are raiding villages in the Upper Nile around Malakal with equal zeal as that of Darfur," AACC General Secretary Rev Dr Mvume Dandala told a news conference in Nairobi. Mvume led a team of AACC officials who visited Sudan last week. "The AACC believes there are strong grounds for investigating and monitoring reports of crimes against humanity in Sudan," he said. "Reports reaching us last evening [Wednesday] from our contacts in Sudan said that within the last four days, homes of an estimated 23,000 villagers have been razed down in the Upper Nile," said Mvume. "We further learned that the militias were moving towards the northern part of Upper Nile causing thousands of helpless villagers to flee their homes," he added. Since early March, between 50,000 and 150,000 people have been displaced by a series of militia attacks in the Upper Nile area known as the Shilluk Kingdom, according to various humanitarian sources. Most of the displaced have moved to government garrison towns, the Nuba mountains, the Panaru area, a group of islands in the swampy area between the White Nile and Lol rivers, and northern Sudan. With sketchy information from the area and few humanitarian actors on the ground, the numbers and whereabouts of the displaced remains uncertain. Three international NGOs - Tearfund, VSF-Germany and World Vision - and the UN (except for the garrison town of Malakal) have had to pull out of the area. The Shilluk Kingdom area became destabilised after 25 October 2003, when Dr Lam Akol Ajawin, the leader of the government-allied Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army-United (SPLM/A-U), re-defected to the mainstream SPLM/A. Not all of Akol's forces were happy with the move, resulting in an internal split in the SPLM/A-U. In early March 2004, fighting erupted when pro-government militias began attacking villages along the White Nile and Bahr al-Ghazal rivers. According to the US-backed team monitoring attacks against civilians, the Civilian and Protection Monitoring Team (CPMT), this was an apparent attempt to re-establish control over areas in the vacuum created by Akol's re-defection. AACC's president, Rev Dr Nyansako Ni Nku, urged the organisation's constituent national Christian councils throughout Africa to lobby their governments to act on the civil strife in Sudan and called upon the churches themselves to "prepare to render their support to rebuild Sudan" once a peace agreement was reached between the Khartoum government and the SPLM/A. The government and the SPLM/A, which are continuing peace talks in Naivasha, Kenya, are considered to be closer to a comprehensive peace deal than ever before. On Monday both sides agreed to extend the peace talks for an additional week. AACC's peace initiatives in Sudan date back to 1972 when, together with the World Coulcil of Churches, they helped broker the Addis Ababa Peace Agreement between northern and southern Sudan. That deal gave Sudan a 10-year interlude of peace.