SUDAN:The destruction of the town of Abyei has ominous echoes of the recent north-south civil war in which two million people died, writes STEPAHANIE MCCRUMMENin Abyei.
THIS CONTESTED town along Sudan's volatile north-south boundary has been obliterated.
In recent days, its mud houses and thatched-roof markets, its schools, hospitals, offices and shops have been shot, shelled and burned to the ground, and late last week, Sudanese government soldiers in green fatigues were still roaming the streets, looting satellite dishes, mattresses and cases of orange soda from the smoking ruins.
More than 100,000 people - residents of Abyei and surrounding villages who only recently returned home after 20 years of war between the north and south - are gone, chased away in the worst escalation of violence since the government and former southern rebels signed a 2005 peace deal.
Sudanese government officials blame southern forces for the destruction, but southern officials, UN officials, witnesses and people who fled say it was a systematic campaign by the Sudanese government to depopulate the oil-rich area and take it by force.
"The government wants the land," said Mary Barbor, who was among those who fled the town earlier this month. "The government wants the land to belong to the north."
Officials on both sides agree on one point: that perhaps the most dreaded scenario in this conflicted East African country is beginning to unfold - a resumption of the north-south civil war, which killed an estimated two million people, making it one of the deadliest conflicts since the second World War.
"We are being forced to go to war," said Musa Malei, a local official with the Southern People's Liberation Movement, the political arm of the former southern rebel movement. "We are not desiring to go to war - we have been forced to fight."
Analysts have long warned that if the civil war resumed, it would be likely to start in Abyei, whose boundaries remain one of the most explosive unresolved issues of the peace deal that ended Africa's longest-running civil war.
According to that deal, government and southern forces were to withdraw from the area once boundaries were determined by an independent commission. Abyei residents were to decide whether to join the north or the south in a 2011 referendum, when southerners are to vote on secession from the north.
But the agreement began to unravel almost from the start. The ruling party of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir rejected the commission's report, which was supposed to be binding, and both sides have kept forces in the Abyei area.
Now southern officials are accusing Bashir of using a minor street scuffle earlier this month as an excuse to unleash a brutal military campaign that they say is aimed at clearing the area of its pro-southern population ahead of the referendum.
Although fighting has subsided, a high-ranking western diplomat in the region said the situation is so volatile that it could easily slip into what he called a "gates of hell" scenario: a renewed war drawing in rebels from the western Darfur region, along with neighbouring Chad, Uganda and other countries, possibly even the US, which invested heavily in the 2005 peace deal and has steadfastly backed the south with military training and other support. China, deeply invested in Sudanese oil, is also a factor.
"There is a real possibility that this will degenerate," said Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist with the Congressional Research Service in Washington. "People are afraid of it, including southerners. They know there is no going back if war erupts over Abyei."
The civil war was often cast as a conflict between the Muslim and Arab north and the Christian and ethnically African south. But it was more fundamentally about the ruling elite in Khartoum, the capital, depriving southerners of resources - a grievance recently taken up by rebels in Darfur, where conflict broke out in 2003.
As international attention and diplomacy shifted to Darfur, however, the north-south peace deal faltered, with southerners accusing the north of cheating them out of their share of oil revenues and failing to implement other parts of the deal, especially in Abyei.
The hot and spare landscape is politically, ethnically and economically caught between north and south. It is home to the Ngok Dinka tribe and many prominent southern officials, as well as the nomadic Misseriya tribe, whose members drift into the area to graze their cattle and have often been used as mercenaries for both sides. Abyei also contains oil fields worth about $529 million (€335 million) in revenue last year, according to an estimate by the International Crisis Group.
Though tensions have erupted before in Abyei, the violence over several days this month has been the worst in years. It began on May 14th, when southern police officers stopped a car carrying two civilians and a government officer at a routine checkpoint in Abyei, according to government and southern officials. There was an exchange of heated words, the police asked the passengers to get out, and soon the situation degenerated into an exchange of fire. The government officer and two policemen were killed. A second government officer was wounded.
When that officer died the next day in hospital, government forces began to fire machine guns inside its wards, then outside, witnesses said, finally unleashing a full-scale assault on the town, whose population had recently swelled from 5,000 to about 30,000 as southerners returned home from long exiles to rebuild.
Government officials said southern rebels shelled the town. "They were shelling every part of the city randomly," said Dirdirry Mohamed Ahmed, a former Sudanese ambassador and key government negotiator on Abyei.
But witnesses said southern forces had no heavy artillery within range of Abyei. And Nyajith Mading, who had returned only a month ago after spending nearly two decades in Khartoum, said it was government soldiers who were controlling the town and who began torching the newly thatched houses and freshly supplied shops.
"I heard bombing and the sound of guns and saw people killed," she said. "I took my child and I ran."
Along with thousands of others, she walked south for three days to the town of Agok, where displaced people have been menaced again in recent days by a low-flying government Antonov bomber, a familiar sound to those who lived through the war.
Government forces shelled an Abyei police station, killing 14 officers, before southern forces began fighting back with machine guns and heavy weapons on the outskirts of town. Government officials say 21 of their soldiers were killed; southern forces have not provided figures.
A fragile ceasefire has held since last week, but the damage appears to be complete. Abyei is empty but for the government soldiers with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders, who recently were burning down houses and looting desks, chairs, mattresses, drugs, food and whatever else they could salvage from the ruins.In recent days, the government forces began digging trenches around town, planting machine guns in sandbagged holes. The former southern rebels have pulled back to points south of town and are reinforcing their positions with heavy weapons, including tanks.
"This was a systematic campaign with the clear objective of displacing permanently the civilian population so the outcome of the referendum would be in the government's favour," said Dagne, who was in the region during the attack. "You depopulate, then you repopulate with Misseriya, and you've changed the equation on the ground." - (LA Times-Washington Post service)