Sudan Rejects UN Call for Withdrawal

The Washington Post reports:

Sudan has rejected a call by the U.N. Security Council to withdraw its forces from the contested town of Abyei, as internal pressure mounts on South Sudan to respond to the invasion last month.

Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Ahmed Karti, in a statement released over the weekend, said that Abyei is “Sudanese territory,” referring to the border region as well as the town by the same name it seized May 21.

For South Sudan’s leadership, the question of how to respond is politically fraught as it balances competing domestic demands to react and international pleas for restraint. The attack comes just weeks before South Sudan becomes an independent nation July 9, a culmination of decades of armed struggle against the north in which an estimated 2 million southerners died.

The seizure of Abyei derails the full implementation of a 2005 peace agreement, which ended the 22-year Sudanese civil war, and the United States and several other countries have expressed concern that the breach could escalate into the resumption of war.

Abyei, a fertile border region roughly the size of Connecticut, is used by two populations. The Ngok Dinka, non-Arab subsistence farmers who reside permanently in Abyei, believe the land should be part of South Sudan when Sudan splits into two countries on July 9. The Misseriya, Arab nomads who pass through Abyei in the dry season to graze their cattle, believe that Abyei is northern land.

The dispute was supposed to be resolved through a referendum that never took place because of a failure to agree on who was eligible to vote.