US envoy: Sudan at risk of new civil war

A U.S. envoy warned Saturday that Sudan could fall back into civil war if it does not live up to a peace deal in the south. Many say the region must remain stable if the country hopes to resolve a separate conflict in western Darfur.

Andrew Natsios, the White House's special envoy to Sudan, said he was "deeply concerned with the health" of the 2005 peace agreement that ended two decades of civil war between the Arab-dominated, Muslim central government and Christian and animist black southerners.

He cited the failure to set the border between north and south, share the oil wealth and pass key laws. The most serious danger, he said, is the militarization of the contested areas around Sudan's oil fields, where neither the government nor southerners have followed their pledges to pull out troops.

"Tensions are rising, this is dangerous," Natsios told reporters in the capital, Khartoum, ending a 10-day visit to Sudan that brought him both to the south and Darfur. "The risk of a clash is high."

International observers have warned in recent months that the problems in the south have been overshadowed by the crisis in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been displaced in four years of fighting between the government and ethnic African rebels.

Former President Carter, who visited Sudan earlier this week, has been among many voices warning that Darfur cannot be solved if the broader peace deal with the southerners collapses. Sudan's government refused for two years to negotiate any serious peace deal in Darfur until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed with the south in 2005.

If war with the south breaks out again, some fear the government could free up its regular troops by granting more leeway to Arab janjaweed militias blamed for many of the atrocities in Darfur. The government denies backing the militias.

The renewed concern comes amid international hopes for a turning point in Darfur. Negotiations between the government and Darfur rebels are to be held in Libya later this month, though some rebels leaders are refusing to attend. The U.N. and African Union, meanwhile, are preparing to send a joint force of 26,000 peacekeepers to replace a smaller, beleaguered AU mission in Darfur.

In the south, fighting broke out last year in the contested town of Malakal, killing more than 150 people over two days before the U.N. intervened. The world body has a 10,000-strong peacekeeping mission in southern Sudan.

Another contested town, Abyei, which lies close to important oil reserves, is considered a powder keg since Khartoum rejected the borders drawn up by an international commission.

"It appears that there is a stalemate," said Natsios, who visited Abyei during his trip.

The peace pact is a complex, multistage agreement and many key deadlines have not been met, Natsios said. He said the north and south have ceased cooperating to solve problems.

A key difficulty, he said, is that while the ruling party in Khartoum and the southerners should be partners in the peace deal, they are also set to face off in the country's general elections scheduled for early 2009.

"I urged them to end the spiraling public rhetoric," Natsios said in an apparent reference to Vice President Salva Kiir, the head of south Sudan's government, who recently warned in a speech that war would resume.

"In private, it's even more acrimonious," said Nastios, who met with both leaderships during his trip.

Kiir is nicknamed "the vice-absent" in some Khartoum circles since he has largely given up attending the national government's meetings or even coming to the capital. He instead spends most of his time in the southern capital of Juba, where his local government is mired in corruption scandals and criticism that it has been slow to improve conditions in the war-ravaged region.

Natsios said many aspects of the 2005 agreement have nonetheless been successful, and the southerners were enjoying improvements they had not seen for decades.

"The terrible bloodshed _ even worse than Darfur _ has stopped," he said, stating the U.S. and the international community were willing to "help in any way" to prevent it from resuming.

Sudan is Africa's largest country and has been dominated by a small elite of northern Arab tribes since its independence from Britain in 1956.

The government of President Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in a military and Islamist coup in 1989, has also quelled another uprising in the east of the country, which remains unstable, and faces unrest in the extreme north and in the region of southern Kordofan.