South Sudan's former rebel movement, which signed a historic peace agreement two years ago with Sudan's ruling party to end one of Africa's longest running wars, abruptly pulled out of the national unity government on Thursday in the gravest blow yet to the peace accord.
The former rebels said the move was intended to press Sudan's ruling party to live up to the multifaceted agreement, which has been hobbled by disputes over borders, troop movements and sharing Sudan's oil profits.
While much of the recent international attention on Sudan has been focused on Darfur, in the western part of the country, tensions over the fragile peace deal in the south have been tightening for months. US officials recently warned that south Sudan could plunge back into war.
The agreement was supposed to foster peace by melding the rebels' organization, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, with the ruling party, the National Congress Party, in a national unity government that would rule Sudan until multiparty elections in 2009.
But the former rebels have said that the unity government was a charade because the ruling party consistently ignored their demands.
The liberation movement announced on Thursday that its ministers and advisers in the government would not work until their grievances had been addressed.
"It was time for a wake-up call," Yasser Arman, a spokesman for the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, said by telephone from Khartoum.
But he said that the movement would not put its leader, Salva Kiir Mayardit, who is president of south Sudan and vice president of the national government, on strike because that would be too drastic.
Officials with the National Congress Party declined to comment on the withdrawal.
The biggest issues are how to draw the north-south border and how to divide Sudan's oil wealth.
These decisions are intertwined because much of the oil lies along the border. In 2011, southerners will vote to remain in Sudan or create their own country.
The north-south treaty ended the fighting that raged off and on in south Sudan for nearly 50 years.
An estimated 2.2 million people died -- 10 times as many as in Darfur.
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