| Submit your comments on this article |
| Africa Horn |
| US calls on South Africans to prevent S. Sudan disaster |
| 2012-01-19 |
| PRETORIA: A top US envoy on Wednesday urged South Africa to use its influence to help prevent a humanitarian disaster in a violence-wracked region in Sudan that borders the new nation of South Sudan. Princeton Lyman, the special US envoy on Sudan, said civilians caught up in fighting in Sudan’s Blue Nile and South Kordofan states are running out of food and medicine. He said South Africa should pressure Sudan to allow in international humanitarian agencies. “The prospect of hundreds of thousands of people dying with no access to food or medicine is something we can’t accept,” Lyman said in a speech Wednesday in South Africa’s capital. “We can prevent it. There’s time to do it.” South Africa has long been a mediator in Sudan, and a former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, chairs a special African Union committee on Sudan. Sudan’s ambassador to South Africa, Ali Yousif Alsharif, said Wednesday his government might yield if Mbeki were to call for international aid groups to be able to work freely in Blue Nile and South Kordofan. But Alsharif, who appeared alongside Lyman at a forum organized by South Africa’s foreign affairs department, added: “There is no famine in these areas. There is fighting, but it is caused by the attacks by neighboring South Sudan.” Shades of Baghdad Bob... Fighting between the Sudanese army and rebels who want to topple the Khartoum government started last year in the states, and has raised concern about a larger north-south war erupting again. Groups in both states, which border the new country of South Sudan, sided with the south during a lengthy civil war but remain part of the north. South Sudan has faced a host of problems since gaining independence in July. Some 80,000 people fleeing the fighting in Blue Nile and South Kordofan have sought refuge in impoverished and underdeveloped South Sudan. South Sudan’s Jonglei state has seen deadly ethnic violence. And tensions have risen between Sudan and South Sudan over sharing oil. |
| Posted by:Steve White |