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Financial Times

A surprise intervention at the weekend by Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations secretary-general, has drawn warnings from senior officials in south Sudan that any outside efforts to influence a referendum next year could lead to further conflict.

Mr Ban told an African Union summit at the weekend that he would “work hard” to avoid the secession of south Sudan following the referendum.

South Sudan’s regional government quickly decried that as an attempt by the UN to influence the outcome of the referendum it is meant only to administer.

“It is not the responsibility of the UN to help the people of the south to take either decision [in the referendum],” Luka Biong Deng, minister of presidential affairs in south Sudan’s regional government, told the Financial Times.

The UN chief’s views have been echoed by others. Diplomats fear a vote for independence would resonate in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and elsewhere.

Sudan’s north-south civil war ended with a peace deal in 2005 and the country is preparing for two watershed events: next January’s referendum on southern independence and this April’s national elections.

But on the ground in Malakal, the dust-blown riverside capital of Upper Nile, one of the south’s oil-rich states, relations remain tense between the two armies that live on either side of a dividing line.

The Sudanese Armed Forces of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s Islamist president, and the mainly Christian former rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army were supposed to merge under the peace deal that ended a 22-year war that left 2m dead. But Malakal is a glaring example of how mistrust on fundamental issues – politics, religion, tribe – is preventing some of the so-called joint integrated units from working.

Twice since 2006 it has been shaken by gunfire in fighting between the two armies sparked by visits to the town by Gabriel Tang, a northern general and war-time nemesis of the SPLA.

In clashes last February 30 civilians and as many soldiers were killed, according to Human Rights Watch. In November 2006 the death toll was 150.

Some in Malakal fear the next flashpoint will be the April elections, Sudan’s first in 24 years.

Most Sudanese are enthusiastic about the polls. But western diplomats say the process will be too messy – millions of illiterate people will vote in areas where safeguards against fraud are limited – and that it is not worth the risk of fresh violence so close to the independence referendum. Others argue that Mr Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Darfur, will let the referendum take place only if the election gives him a degree of legitimacy.

The poll is important to diplomats who want to negotiate a deal between elected elites in north and south Sudan that would give the south de facto independence.

Analysts say any attempt to block full independence would trigger renewed war. Michael Miakol, a priest in Malakal, says: “If the south Sudanese choose to make a separation then no one can go against it. I don’t know why the [UN] secretary-general wants to question that.” But Gatluak Deng Garang, a former southern ally of Mr Bashir and former governor of Upper Nile, links the continued presence of SAF troops to what is beneath the ground.

“The northerners will want to occupy the oil areas, definitely,” he says. “They will never leave the oil to the south . . . if I were a northerner, I would not let the land go.”