20100801
reuters

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Talks have stalled between Sudan's rival northern and southern halves over the disputed oil-producing Abyei region and could re-ignite a conflict which claimed millions of lives, the region's leader said on Sunday.

Abyei has been the most contentious dispute between the former southern rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the ruling northern National Congress Party (NCP), both before and after a 2005 peace deal that ended Africa's longest running civil war.

The conflict was fought over religion, ethnicity, ideology and oil -- must of which lies along the north-south border. it claimed 2 million lives, say aid agencies, mostly from hunger and disease and destabilised much of east Africa.

South Sudan will vote in a referendum on independence in January and Abyei should hold a simultaneous vote on whether to join the south.

But the partners cannot agree on the make up of the Abyei referendum commission, who will be able to vote or whether to hold long-delayed elections there.

"The issue of the Abyei referendum has come to a standstill," Deng Arop, the head of Abyei's administration, told reporters in Khartoum. "This has the potential to ... cause a regional and international conflict."

Arop, who is from the SPLM, also complained the nomadic Missiriya tribe, some of whom were used by the north as a militia to fight the SPLM, had begun to settle 75,000 people in the north of Abyei to change the demographic of the region and influence the vote.

Arop estimated there were some 100,000 original Abyei residents excluding the Missiriya.