Negotiations needed to avoid war in the east - ICG

Negotiations are needed immediately to address a simmering conflict in eastern Sudan and avoid the outbreak of a new regional war, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG). In a report, "Sudan: Saving the Peace in the East", the advocacy organisation said that if the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) - now part of the Sudanese government - went ahead with a troop withdrawal scheduled in the east, the low-intensity conflict there risked becoming a major new war with disastrous humanitarian consequences. The troop withdrawal is part of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or “CPA”, signed by Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party and the then rebel SPLM almost a year ago. The agreement ended a 21 year civil war in southern Sudan, but did not address the political and economic grievances of rebel groups in either eastern Sudan or the Sudanese western region of Darfur. "Like Darfur, we have a peace agreement which falls short of providing fair wealth and power-sharing to other areas in northern Sudan," said David Mozersky, senior Sudan analyst for the ICG, at a press briefing in Nairobi on Thursday. Under the terms of the agreement, the SPLM is obliged to withdraw its forces from eastern Sudan by 9 January 2006. Mozersky said the SPLM was far behind schedule, expecting to withdraw 50 percent of its forces from the east by the end of March, and complete the pull-out only in October 2006. "Given that SPLM was much more implicated [in the war] in the east than it was in Darfur, a new conflict there has the potential to unravel the CPA and draw the SPLM back into the conflict," Mozersky warned. According to the ICG’s new report, the SPLM "has a duty to ensure that its withdrawal from eastern Sudan does not create a security vacuum that could invite escalation." The main concern, Mozersky said, was how the rest of the Sudanese government would react to the SPLM pull-out, and to the possibility of more rebel attacks. "Will they target civilians? The government has shown such viciousness in Darfur, in the Nuba Mountains and in the south, that you have to expect the worst," Mozersky said. Eastern Sudan is a strategic region, including Sudan’s economic lifeline to the outside world, Port Sudan, and its oil pipeline, as well as irrigated agricultural schemes and a long border with Eritrea, with whom Sudan has poor relations. The Sudanese government has a heavy security presence in the east, involving, according to ICG, three times as many forces as in the troubled region of Darfur. The rebel Eastern Front is an alliance between two rebel movements, the Beja Congress and a smaller group, the Rashaida Free Lions. It has been active in an impoverished region near the Eritrean border, but fighting is sporadic and on a small scale. "It is unclear whether the rebels can do much more than small hit-and-run attacks, especially as the SPLM provided the bulk of the forces in the east,” Mozersky said…”But they can do substantial damage to the port, the oil pipeline and other vital infrastructure." The SPLM needed to use its leverage as a member of the government of national unity, to start comprehensive negotiations, the ICG report stated. The international community needed to work closely with key regional actors, particularly Eritrea. The ICG also said significant donor attention and resources were needed in eastern Sudan to reverse crude mortality rates and malnutrition levels that were even higher than in Darfur. The eastern rebels accuse the government of marginalising remote regions of the country like their own. They see the year-old peace agreement between the government and the SPLM as a model for a political settlement for their own region. In a flare-up of violence in January 2005, Sudanese security forces crushed a demonstration of local Beja people in Port Sudan, killing over 20 people and wounding hundreds. More than 150 members of a political movement, the Beja Congress, were detained. Mozersky said many Beja youths had joined the movement after this, and that the Beja Congress was now mobilised in a way it had not been in the past. Originally a nomadic people, many Beja live in extensive shantytowns on the outskirts of Port Sudan. They moved to the port to work as labourers in the 1980s, after a famine killed their cattle and mechanised farming took over their land.