IN what a Khartoum’s Information Ministry official linked to South Sudan’s seizure last week of the Heglig oil field, Sudanese lawmakers have voted unanimously in a resolution to brand South Sudan “an enemy.”
The parliamentary vote in Khartoum came as a United Nations (UN) spokesman confirmed that Sudanese planes had bombed the body’s peacekeepers’ camp in South Sudan’s border area on Sunday.
No one was hurt during the attack on the small UN base in Mayom village in Unity state, Kouider Zerrouk said.
“The government of South Sudan is an enemy and all Sudanese state agencies have to treat her accordingly,” the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) quoted a resolution by the lawmakers as stating.
The Sudanese government has also warned South Sudan against prejudicing the oil infrastructures in the Heglig region, which has been controlled by South Sudan’s army since Tuesday.
“We warn the state of South Sudan against prejudicing the infrastructures of the oil industry of Sudan in the Heglig region. The hints by South Sudan in this regard mean their insistence on the transfer of the conflict between the two countries to a new stage,” Al-Obeid Marawih, spokesman of the Sudanese Foreign Ministry, said in a statement obtained by Xinhua.
The South Sudan had accused Sudan of launching attacks on its territory from the frontier Heglig oil field.
Meanwhile, fierce fighting at the border between Sudan and South Sudan is worsening an already grim humanitarian situation there, aid workers said yesterday, with a surge of refugees arriving in overstretched camps.
In South Sudan’s Yida refugee camp – just one of several strung out along the volatile border – around 400 refugees are arriving every day, up from an average of 50 a day last week, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) aid agency said.
Those refugees are fleeing civil war and hunger in the Nuba mountains of Sudan’s Southern Kordofan state, an area close to where Sudan and South Sudan’s rival armies have been fighting in clashes that began last month.
There has been a “wave of refugees reaching the camp in crowded trucks and on foot,” IRC aid worker, Elizabeth Pender, told AFP from Yida refugee camp, some 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of the border with Sudan.
The country seceded in July last year from Khartoum following a civil war, which ended in 2005.
But a number of major disputes remain, including over oil and the official demarcation of the international border, and there have been a number of clashes since.
The BBC, however, wrote that the full ramifications of the vote are not clear, but it is evident that both countries are close to a full war.
According to Agence France Presse (AFP), the Speaker of Sudan’s Parliament, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Tahir, called for Khartoum to overthrow the South Sudanese government.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|