Fighting in the key south Sudan town of Malakal this week has killed about 50 people and left another 100 wounded, a United Nations official said on Friday.
”According to our estimates, drawn from on-the-ground observations and different sources, the violence has resulted in about 50 deaths and 100 wounded” among both combatants and civilians, the official said.
Fighting erupted on Tuesday between former rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which now runs south Sudan, and supporters of Gabriel Tang, a former militia leader who fought alongside the Sudanese army in the 1983 to 2005 civil war.
The clashes lasted a day, and an official said the situation was ”fairly quiet” on Friday.
Tang supporters, or Tangginyang, have been incorporated into Khartoum’s regular forces, joining a mixed north-south unit patrolling areas that are still sensitive four years after the end of a war that caused two million deaths.
Tang has been based in Khartoum since 2006, after clashes between his men and the former SPLA soldiers.
He returned this week to the town near the border between the northern and southern regions of Sudan.
Gabriel Changson Chang, information minister in the semi-autonomous south Sudan, on Wednesday accused the national army of seeking to provoke ”a new civil war” following the Malakal clashes.
But in a Khartoum news conference on Wednesday, Tang denied the south Sudan allegations and said he had gone to Malakal because a member of his family had died.
He said that after he arrived in Malakal, UN peacekeepers asked him to leave because the SPLA did not want him there. He then said he was attacked by the SPLA and that Sudanese soldiers defended him.
Sudanese military spokesperson Brigadier Osman Mohammed al-Aghbash also denied the army was involved in the Malakal fighting and said that Tang had permission to enter the town.
Tang ”travelled to Malakal town on the day of the incidents with an official permission and wearing civilian clothes,” Sudan’s state-run SUNA news agency quoted Aghbash as saying in a statement.
”There was nothing to prevent his entry to the town in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of Sudan, which stipulates the freedom of movement,” Aghbash said.
”Provocations against Major General Tanj started immediately after his arrival at Malakal, a matter that had obliged him to take refuge with the joint forces, which are the forces that are officially responsible for protecting the people and properties in the town.”
Malakal has had one of the more fragile security situations since the 2005 peace deal ended the civil war between the Arab- and Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian or animist, non-Arab south.
Nine people were killed around the town in inter-ethnic clashes on January 9.
The fighting comes as the world awaits a decision from the International Criminal Court (ICC) next week on whether to seek the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for alleged war crimes in Darfur. – AFP
