Sudan ‘on brink of third civil war’: CEN 5.07.09 p 6.

The Archbishop of the Sudan has issued a plea for international help to prevent the outbreak of a third Sudanese Civil War. Weapons have flooded the country, Archbishop Daniel Deng of Juba has warned in a May 4 letter to the international community and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the Second Sudanese Civil War is in danger of collapse. Signed in January 2005, the CPA or Naivasha Agreement ended the war between the Arab Islamist government in Khartoum and the predominantly Christian and African Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). Almost 2 million people died from war-related famine, disease and violence from the conflict, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants reported, while four million people, an estimated 80 per cent of the population of Southern Sudan were forced into flight during the war. Sudan’s first civil war lasted from independence in 1955 to 1972 and its second civil war was fought over the same ground and same issues from 1983 to 2005. A third civil war was on the horizon, Archbishop Deng warned, unless the US, UK, the Netherlands and other regional governments that had guaranteed the CPA took action. “Peoples in Western and Central Equatoria are being attacked, murdered and displaced by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), rumoured to be supplied by people within Sudan,” he said, while “a large number of civilians in Eastern Equatoria, Lakes and Jonglei states are armed.” Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.