KHARTOUM REGIME ACCUSED OVER WAR MONGERING
The African Union sponsored talks between the Khartoum regime and the government of Southern Sudan have been left hanging in doubt, when accusations and counter-accusations led to the temporary withdrawal of one delegation. A regular source from Juba on request but insisting on anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter said overnight: Khartoum has been bombing our border areas for a while now. They are driving our brothers and sisters out of their homelands. In the three states of South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Abyei they are spreading a regime of terror, ethnic cleansing and burned earth. They rape, loot, burn and kill and it is Darfur all over again. They are using militias alongside their regular units and their Antonov bomber aircraft are flying daily missions.
We are forced to defend ourselves, we are not seeking to return to war but the Bashir regime sees war as the only option to survive internally now. They never expected us to stop our oil exports from which they were stealing most of it to finance their lifestyle, their troops and their re-armaments. So when we stopped our oil, from which we are suffering ourselves a lot, they lost a source of income even if they had it by theft only. Our neighbours know all about the Khartoum aggression, we have briefed them and we know that we will not be alone this time if that regime tries another war, we will not be alone this time.
The three states are still due to decide, or consult as the language in some of the respective documents goes, on their future and the original, ethnic resident populations are expected, should Khartoum ever live up to this obligation under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, to vote almost entirely for joining the Southern Sudan for independence from their slave masters and tormentors. However, in anticipation has the regime been displacing residents by the hundreds of thousands and stuffed what is often called Northerners into the disputed regions to tilt the outcome of any referendum.
Open conflict has been flaring up increasingly often since the South gained independence from the North in July 2011, mostly fuelled by proxy militias but of late with open involvement of the regimes airforce and ground troops, as internal pressure on Bashir builds up over his failure to keep the resource rich South in a unified Sudan and the resulting sharp rise in economic problems, runaway inflation and lack of funds for the most basic of services to his erstwhile supporters.
These developments, as previously indicated here, have led to some doubts over promised investments in the South over fears of renewed conflict and prevented an increase in tourism, as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas along the contentious present borderline could of course any time spread further into the territory of the Southern Sudan. Watch this space as the latest escalation of this simmering hotspot in Africa evolves.
