Fighting between government forces and rebels broke out in South Kordofan in June and spread to neighbouring Blue Nile in September
LONDON (AlertNet) - Sudan's dry season is likely to herald a new military offensive in the troubled South Kordofan and Blue Nile areas, inflicting a fresh wave of displacement on a region weakened by months of clashes, a campaign group has warned.
Fighting between government forces and rebels broke out in South Kordofan in June and spread to neighbouring Blue Nile in September. Tens of thousands of people are thought to have fled their homes in the region close to the border with South Sudan.
Dutch-based IKV Pax Christi predicted that displacement would rise with the onset of the dry season in November with members of the Nuba community afraid that government tanks, troops and militia currently deterred by waterlogged roads would soon be on the move again.
Once key battlegrounds in Sudan's civil war, the two areas are home to thousands of fighters who sided with the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) rebels in their war against Khartoum.
Following the end of the conflict in 2005, many SPLA joined their counterparts from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) to form joint military units - meant to embody a vision of unity in the period between the signing of the peace deal and a southern referendum on independence in January this year.
When the south voted overwhelmingly for independence, it raised concerns in Khartoum about the number of weapons in the hands of fighters formerly aligned to the SPLA.
The SPLA-N, the local wing of the SPLA, blamed the recent outbreak of violence on SAF attempts to disarm its members in these joint units. However, the northern army says it was trying to stop an attempted uprising.
"The immediate prospects for peace in the two areas are not good," Pax Christi said in a report.
"Both sides believe there is advantage in continued military action - the SPLA-N because of its early successes and what it perceives as a process of disintegration in the government's forces and finances; SAF because of the approaching dry season and the chance, as it sees it, of redressing military balance."
"CATASTROPHIC" CONDITIONS
It estimates that 226,000 people from the Nuba community are displaced in Southern Kordofan without food in areas blockaded by Khartoum, while more than 9,000 others have crossed over to South Sudan, fleeing militia raids and aerial bombardment.
On Friday, the U.N. refugee agency said nearly 2,000 Sudanese refugees had arrived in western Ethiopia over the past four days and more were expected. Mostly women, children and the elderly, they said they fled bombings and the fear of being bombed by Antonov planes.
Living alonside the Nuba, are the Arab cattle-herding Hawazama and Missirya tribes who have been forced from SPLA-controlled areas in as yet unknown numbers due to cattle-rustling and reprisal attacks and arrests, Pax Christi said.
Arabs who usually migrate south with their animals in the dry season fear armed opposition from the SPLA-N if they attempt the move this year, the report said.
"A deadly combination of war, late rains, the humanitarian blockade of SPLM-held areas, and a government ban on all international involvement in relief work - including needs assessments - is expected to leave 400,000 Nuba civilians without any food in the next few weeks," Pax Christi said.
It said that conditions were already declining fast as the 'hunger period' before the next harvest in December-January reaches its peak.
"Most of the displaced lack adequate shelter, food, clean water and medicine, and are being re-displaced as host communities themselves run short of food," it added.
Not only has aerial bombardment stopped farmers from tending to their crops, but in several areas Pax Christi researchers visited a further deterrent has been the detention by government forces of groups of people working in the fields.
"Relatives say the seizures (of people) are part of government strategy to use food as a weapon of war," the report said.
It noted that without immediate humanitarian access, infant and elderly deaths from malnutrition would increase sharply.
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