A bombing on the disputed north-south border of Sudan heightened concern of renewed conflict in the region, but a southern Sudan army official says the attack was aimed at rebels, not the south, and observers doubted this one incident would lead to anything more serious.
Sudan has been high on the US foreign policy agenda, with top officials working to ensure a January referendum that could split Africa’s biggest country into two is held on time. They are also working to avoid renewed conflict between north and south Sudan, who more than five years ago ended a decades-long war.
The borders of Northern Bahr Gazal and Southern Darfur, where the bombing occurred, are in dispute and the 2005 peace deal required the border between southern Sudan and the north be demarcated. That exercise, however, has also been fraught with delays.
Colonel Philip Aguer, spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which protects oil-rich Southern Sudan, said on Saturday that north Sudan’s military bombed a disputed north-south border area, but the attack was not meant for the south.
Both parts of Sudan are allowed to keep separate armies under a 2005 peace deal that ended their 21-year war.
Sudanese military spokesman Sawarmy Khaled said the army attacked fighters from Darfur’s most powerful rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement. Khaled told the semiofficial Sudan Media Center that the fighters were trying to infiltrate the south and take refuge behind the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the South Kordufan region.
Khaled was quoted as saying that the Sudanese army attacked the group, “inflicting heavy losses on them, including injured and dead.”
He said the military was chasing remnants of the group.
Aguer said north Sudan military officers consulted with their southern counterparts through a joint military panel after the bombing on Friday by an Antonov plane and determined the bombs were launched in the north, but landed in southern Sudan territory close by.
The panel, called the Joint Defense Board, is part of the 2005 peace deal and is meant to help avoid misunderstandings between the armies of the north and the south.
He said the bombing took place in Northern Bahr Gazal State, located in the southwest of the country and part of southern Sudan, but would not give a precise location. Aguer said there were casualties, but declined to give details.
The top UN official in southern Sudan, David Gressly, said casualties were in the single digits and a UN team was going to the area to assess the situation.
Lazaro Sumbeiywo, the Kenyan retired general who mediated the 2005 peace deal, said that since signing the agreement, north and south had only fought once, in 2008, in a dispute over the oil-rich area of Abyei.
Sumbeiywo declined to comment on Friday’s incident, but said when he went to assess the general situation in southern Sudan two weeks ago, he did not find the semi-autonomous region tense.
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