New Civil War Feared in Sudan As Town Empties

In the contested town of Abyei, fighting between government soldiers and southern forces destroyed homes, schools and businesses. Each side blames the other, but both agree it could lead to a resumption of a north-south war. (By Stephanie Mccrummen -- The Washington Post)
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"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 revenue 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 in revenue last year, according to an estimate by the International Crisis Group research organization.

Though tensions have erupted before in Abyei, the violence over several days this month was the worst in years.

It began May 14, when southern police officers stopped a car carrying two civilians and a government officer at a routine checkpoint here, 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 at a 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 around 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 there 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.