Army accuses SPLA of attacking displaced people

The Sudanese army on 13 July accused the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) of shelling a displaced people’s camp for civilians from Daym Zubayr in western Bahr al-Ghazal, southern Sudan, the official Sudanese news agency SUNA reported on 14 July. The army killed four of the rebel attackers and the remainder fled, it quoted army spokesman General Muhammad Bashir Sulayman as saying, though he did not specify the exact location of the camp. SPLA spokesman Samson Kwaje denied that there had been any such attack and said the government claims did not make sense. “Why should we attack our own [southern] people who are displaced?” he asked. Kwaje said many of those displaced by the fighting for Daym Zubayr and Raga had fled to Southern Darfur, and could not therefore have been attacked by the SPLA, while those not connected to the government or army had fled to surrounding villages and were now being routinely bombed by government aircraft. The SPLA spokesman called on any NGO or humanitarian agency who knew of any attack on a displaced people’s camp to make the details known.

More than 30,000 civilians fled their homes following an offensive by the SPLA in Western Bahr al-Ghazal, where the rebel group captured Daym Zubayr and Raga. There were two main directions for the population flow: a northerly route through Timsah, 144 km north of Raga, and from where many continued on to Al-Ferdows and to Ed Daein (Al-Duwaym), in central Southern Darfur; and a more westerly route, then swinging north, through Radom to Buram in Southern Darfur. Over 5,000 internally displaced persons who had been sheltering in Timsah were instructed to “move out” after the Sudanese government declared it a military area, the inter-agency Emergency Response Team for Western Bahr al-Ghazal reported at the end of June.