LONDON, Mar 6 (IPS) - A major catastrophe is in the making in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan where an estimated 500,000 people have run out of food and need emergency relief aid, say Sudanese community leaders
here.
''The situation is becoming very desperate. The people need emergency food. They need medicine... to treat malaria and other
ailments like dysentery,'' Dr Suliman Rayal of the London-based Nuba Mountains Solidarity Abroad told IPS on Thursday.
To highlight the plight of the Nuba, Rayal and Yusuf Kuwa, a top official of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA),
has held talks with Dutch and British foreign ministry officials and parliamentarians.
The two urged London and the Hague to
exert pressure on the Sudanese government to open up the Nuba Mountains
to aid
agencies.
The aid agencies were expelled from
the Nuba Mountains in October 1991. And, since then, the Islamic radical
government of
Lt- General Omar Hassan al Bashir has been resisting all attempts by United
Nations and other international bodies to allow
food to reach the starving people there.
The problem of the Nuba, who number
over one million, started after backed the SPLA in 1983, following appeals
by leader
John Garang to help 'liberate' Sudan from the 'minority Arab clique' in
Sudan.
Sudan, the largest country in Africa,
has been ruled by Arabs since independence from Britain in January 1956.
Garang comes from the south, a region
inhabited by non-Muslim Africans. And the Nuba, a minority which hail from
the Arab
north, and profess Islam, Christianity and traditional African religion,
heeded Garang's appeal and joined the rebel Movement
en masse.
But following the SPLA split in August
1991, the local contingency in the Nuba Mountains found itself isolated.
The
government, taking advantage of the isolation and poor supplies, encircled
the area under its control, seizing hill passes used by
the Nuba tribes for centuries.
The regime's troops took also control
of the water points in the area, in a bid to deny them to those whom the
government
perceived to be sympathetic to the SPLA.
In addition, the local population have
been prevented from tilling the land, and their farms have been taken over
by the regime's
forces.
To further complicate the crisis in
the Nuba Mountains, the Nuba SPLA itself has split into two factions. The
faction, under
Kuwa, is loyal to Garang. The other, led by poet and journalist Mohamed
Haroun Kafi, has signed a peace pact with the
Khartoum government.
Kafi heads the so-called SPLA/Nuba Mountains
chapter. The charter was also signed by Riak Machar, another former
Garang ally and leader of the Southern Sudan Independent Movement (SSIM).
But Kuwa described Kafi as ''a one-man
army'' and that he had ''no soldiers under his command''.
Hassan al Turabi, speaker of the rubber-stamp
parliament who is widely believed to be the power behind the regime in
the
Sudan, told journalists in the capital, Khartoum, recently that he expected
the charter to be formalised into an agreement soon.
Once formalised, he said, it would end
Sudan's war and bring a ''lasting peace'' to a country which has seen no
peace since
independence in 1956.
However this charter is being threatened
by a new force, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the umbrella opposition
grouping, based in neighbouring Eritrea.
Garang is the commander-in-chief of
the NDA forces which invaded Sudan from the east of the country in December
1996.
The alliance include the country's main
traditional parties, the Umma Party of former prime minister Sadiq al Mahdi
and the
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Mohamed Osman Mirghani.
Rayal said Sudan needed a peaceful solution
now. ''If there is no peace, the country will plunge into anarchy and disintegrate
like Somalia,'' he said.
But, in order to be acknowledged by
government, Rayal said, the NDA should arm and present itself as a force
to be
reckoned with. ''If we don't have a balance of force, the government in
Khartoum will not take us seriously,'' he said.
That may be too late for the majority
of the people in the Nuba Mountains many of whom have been rounded up and
sent to
''peace camps'', built by the government to isolate the civilian population
from the rebel Movement.
More than a million people are believed
to have died in Sudan's civil war, many of them in the Nuba Mountains.
(END/IPS/MN/RJ/97)
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