Displaced in Shilluk Kingdom in urgent need of aid, says rebel leader

Tens of thousands of displaced people in the Shilluk Kingdom area of Upper Nile, southern Sudan, are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to a Sudanese rebel leader. Since early March, over 70,000 people had been displaced from their homes and over 24 Shilluk villages south and southwest of Malakal destroyed by "six militias affiliated with the Sudanese government", Dr Lam Akol Ajawin of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), told reporters in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on Tuesday. Neimat Bilal, the press counsellor at the Sudanese embassy in Nairobi, said the "humanitarian crisis" in the area had resulted from a "tribal conflict". "We join Akol in appealing to the international community to give support to those people who have been victims of the tribal conflict," she said. "There are no army troops in the area..those militia are not supported by the government," she added. According to Akol, the numbers killed in the attacks remained unclear as information was incomplete from many areas. "We think there are hundreds, but we are still compiling names. We want the international community to be aware in order to help the situation to stabilise the people who are there [in Shilluk] and attract back those who have gone to other areas," he added. Food crops were burned along with grass used for building homes to prevent people from moving back, he said. This, he added, had caused people to disperse in many directions, including the garrison town of Malakal, the Jabal Liri area of the Nuba mountains, the Panaru area and a group of islands in the swampy area between the White Nile and Lol rivers. People on the islands were surviving with no shelter and on a diet of water lilies, Akol said, as they had no nets or hooks to catch fish. With patchy information from the area and no United Nations presence on the ground - except for Malakal - the numbers of internally displaced people in the Shilluk Kingdom remains uncertain. Sudanese churches, the UN and other relief agencies cite between 50,000 and 120,000, while an estimated 26,000 have been registered in Malakal town. The Shilluk Kingdom area became destabilised after 25 October 2003, when Akol, the leader of the government-allied SPLM/A-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 in earnest when militias began attacking and destroying villages along the White Nile and Bahr al-Ghazal rivers in an apparent attempt to re-establish control over areas in the vacuum created by Akol's re-defection, according to the US-backed team monitoring attacks against civilians, the Civilian and Protection Monitoring Team (CPMT). The CPMT reported that in Mid-March, militia forces supported by Sudanese police and security forces from Malakal attacked the villages of Nyilwak (46 km southwest of Malakal) and Popwojo, burning and destroying them. The Verification and Monitoring Team, the monitoring body of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development peace process, has said it also found evidence of a "campaign of violence" by militias allied to the government. The Sudanese government denied involvement in clashes in the Shilluk Kingdom. In an official response to the CPMT report, the foreign ministry said Akol's forces had "terrified civilians" and interrupted the movement of river transport along the Nile. "He [Akol] also used to identify Nuer people as enemies, killing them, and took many steps towards waging civil war and ethnic dividing," it said. Akol on Tuesday warned that the attacks had stopped for now, but that fighting might flare up again, threatening the entire Sudanese peace process. "It is not a tribal conflict. It is a conflict between the government and the SPLM/A," he repeated. "We don't want to be the cause of any breakdown in talks, but at the same time we are also making it very clear that if the [ceasefire] agreement that people entered into is not respected, then the consequences will be very great," he added.