Sudan's Nuba Mountains risk new conflict

August 26, 2008 (JUBA) – Sudan's central Nuba Mountains region risks erupting into open conflict again because of a build-up of troops and weapons, analysts said on Tuesday.

The Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey research group said northern and southern forces were breaking the terms of a 2005 peace deal by taking on recruits in the politically tense but overlooked region.

The area, covered in large rocky hills, was a key battleground in Sudan's two-decade, north-south civil war, which ended with the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

But northern and southern leaders have accused each other of obstructing critical parts of the deal and major fighting has broken out twice between the two armies in other flashpoints.

"Tensions are mounting in the (Nuba Mountains) region ... development plans are overshadowed by the danger of a return to open conflict," the report stated.

"The area is highly militarized with both parties to the conflict actively violating the CPA ... by recruiting members of armed groups," it added.

The study said the Nuba Mountains had been largely ignored while international attention focused on Darfur and other north-south clashes, like the fighting that broke out over the central oil-rich region of Abyei earlier this year.

Under the CPA, the southern army was supposed to redeploy out of the Nuba Mountains area and northern forces were supposed to reduce their numbers to pre-war levels.

But the Small Arms Survey reported the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army had grown with 1,500 new recruits over the last six months.

The northern army has refused to let U.N. peacekeepers monitor their troop numbers in the area, said the report, adding that the Khartoum-supported Popular Defence Forces militia could now have as many as 20,000 men in the region.

The 2005 peace deal gave southerners a share in the country's oil revenues and their own semi-autonomous government. But many in Nuba have seen little change, said one international analyst, speaking on conditions of anonymity.

"Definitely there's trouble ahead. You just have to look at the frustration," the analyst added.

The Nuba Mountains lie in one of Sudan's special "transitional" areas, identified under the 2005 deal. Although currently administratively part of northern Sudan the region was promised greater autonomy under the peace deal.

Members of the many Nuba tribes, citing marginalisation by Khartoum, had joined the south during the civil war.

Southerners will have an independence referendum in 2011 but residents in the Nuba Mountains area have only been promised a vaguer "popular parliamentary consultation" on their status.