2010 (WASHINGTON) – The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) may authorize beefing up the presence of peacekeepers at certain parts of the Sudan’s North-South borders, council diplomats said on Wednesday.
FILE – Members of United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) patrol in the Sudanese town of Abyei on July 22, 2009 (AFP)
Last week, the First Vice President and head of southern Sudan government asked a visiting UNSC delegation to deploy international troops on the borders with the North ahead of the referendum on self-determination in southern Sudan scheduled for January 9, 2011. At the time he was promised that this would be considered.
But council diplomats today said that such a request in unrealistic to implement.
“Nobody thinks it’s realistic to put UNMIS [United Nations Mission in Sudan], even if we had masses more troops, along the north-south border in a country that large,” one council diplomat, who did not want to be identified, was quoted by Reuters.
“But I think one thing we can and should consider … is looking at augmenting UNMIS in certain hotspots along the border where a buffer presence could be established.”
UNMIS is the 10,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force that monitors compliance with a 2005 peace agreement that ended decades of north-south civil war in Sudan.
Khartoum has strongly rejected any move to deploy UN troops on the borders.
“Sudan is still one country and it is very strange that a part of the state asks for international troops without the consent or agreement of the federal government,” said Ibrahim Ghandour, the head of political bureau at the ruling National Congress Party (NCP).
The Sudanese foreign minister Ali Karti on his end described it as a violation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed with the Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) in control of the South.
Troops from both sides have clashed since the CPA, most recently in the contested Abyei oil region. Each side has accused the other of building up troops near their shared border as the southern referendum approaches.
The long awaited self determination referendum in South Sudan is widely expected to result in the creation of the world’s newest state. It has been promised in the CPA though both sides were asked to make unity option an attractive one to Southerners.
The Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir this week warned that the stalled process of demarcating the North-South borders threatens to reignite the conflict between both sides.
(ST)