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Dozens of nomads, soldiers dead in clashes in Sudan

Dozens of armed Arab nomads and several soldiers have been killed in bitter clashes with forces from the ex-rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in southern Sudan, the two sides said on Sunday.

At least 69 nomads and nine soldiers were killed in the latest fighting in the volatile area on Saturday, said Major General Hoth Mai, the ex-rebel deputy chief of staff said in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan.

The fighting in a tense border area also left nearly 120 people wounded, including 97 nomads and 21 soldiers, Mai said.

The area has remained volatile owing to the status of the oil-rich region of Abyei, not yet decided despite the 2005 peace agreement between north and south Sudan following Africa's longest-running civil war.

"They don't want to see any SPLA there, and they want the SPLA to move 40 kilometers south and away from the Nile," Mai said.

The Sudan Media Center, which is close to the intelligence services in Khartoum, quoted a Misseriya tribal chief as saying that more than 25 tribesmen were killed in clashes after attacking an SPLA camp on Saturday.

Misseriya chief Mukhtar Babu Nemir said the assault followed an SPLA attack against a Misseriya village in which one person was killed, the center said.

Fighting first erupted in December, near the disputed oil areas, leaving up to 100 dead, when Khartoum-backed Baggara Arab militia attacked a southern army garrison, after it refused to allow armed nomads into the south.

The clashes ended after south Sudan leader and national First Vice President Salva Kiir told his forces to let the nomads move south and graze their animals, with hopes that they would return to the north during the dry season.

The Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) -- the political movement borne out of the former rebels' army -- said hundreds of Misseriya tribesmen ambushed its soldiers along the Kir river.

Nemir accused the military and the National Congress Party (NCP), with which the SPLM shares national government since the end of two decades of civil war, of using violence to try to create facts on the ground in the border dispute.

"It's very serious and one of the most serious incidents in the area. The NCP must put in mind that they cannot win the war. It will affect the peace process and it is an intended mockery of the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement]," he said in Khartoum.

Relations between the Khartoum authorities in the northern, mainly Arab part of Sudan, and the SPLM have remained tense despite their power-sharing arrangement that followed the peacer agreement signed in January 2005.
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