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Bashir threatens to 'cut hand' of aggressors
Sudan's president says he will not surrender an inch of land as he vows to retake oil-rich Heglig from South Sudan.Sudan's president has said he will "cut" the hand of aggressors and retake the disputed oil-producing Heglig region as his country continues to clash with its southern neighbour South Sudan. Omar al-Bashir told a rally in Sudan's North Kordofan state on Thursday he would not surrender "an inch" of the country and that he would firmly deal with the enemies. "We will not give them an inch of our country, and whoever extends his hand on Sudan, we will cut it," Bashir told thousands of people in El-Obeid, North Kordofan's capital. "Heglig is in Kordofan," he said in the speech broadcast on state television, dancing and waving his walking stick. The region accounts for 50 per cent of Sudan's oil production. Al Jazeera's Peter Greste, reporting from Bentiu, South Sudan, said officials in Juba, the country's capital, had dismissed Bashir's statements as rhetoric. "They [Sudanese authorities] never really accepted the cessation of the South", Barnaba Benjamin, the South Sudanese minister of information, told our correspondent, referring to the referendum that led to South Sudan becoming an independent state. Benjamin said the South was not interested in war with Sudan and that "all they're trying to do is defend South Sudan's territorial integrity". Posted by: tipper 2012-04-19 |
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