NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct. 11 — 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 west, tensions over the fragile peace deal in the south have been bubbling for months. American 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 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,” Yasir Arman, a spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, said by telephone from Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. But he added 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.
The biggest issues are how to draw the north-south border and how to divide Sudan’s oil wealth, intertwined issues 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.
But critics of the men who run the country, a group led by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, say northern leaders have backed away from the greater political changes they committed to in the treaty — like power sharing and preparing Sudan for free elections. This may have gloomy implications for Darfur, where rebel leaders have pinned cooperation with the government on some of the same points.
At the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, said plans to start to deploy an African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur this month were being jeopardized by government delays in approving the necessary foreign troops, turning over land needed for the operation and granting landing rights to United Nations aircraft.
“It is of critical importance that the government extend the support and cooperation necessary,” he told the Security Council.
Jan Eliasson, his envoy for Darfur, told reporters in Khartoum that renewed violence in Darfur would not affect the start of peace talks on Oct. 27 in Libya.
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations.
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