A Town Constantly On Brink of Chaos

MALAKAL, Sudan -- It took just a few hours for the news to spread across this war-toughened town in southern Sudan. One of the Sudanese government's most loyal local militia leaders during its 21-year civil war with the south had returned from exile in the capital, and as word got out, people began leaving the sandy streets.

"We knew there would be fighting," said Mojwok Deng, a journalist who locked himself in his office that late February day as Malakal snapped into a state resembling war.

Soldiers who had been uneasily merged into a special joint unit after a 2005 peace deal separated -- those loyal to the semiautonomous south in one part of town, Sudanese government soldiers in another. Out came machine guns, grenade launchers and tanks. And for one long, hot day and into the next, bullets flew, leaving at least 57 people dead before tempers cooled.

Southern officials quickly accused Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of dispatching the militia leader, Gen. Gabriel Tang Ginye, to pick a fight -- just one more dirty trick, they said, aimed at sabotaging the U.S.-backed peace deal, which many observers see as the glue holding Sudan together.

A one-story town of donkey carts, mango trees and dust-choked taxis, Malakal is a place that seems perpetually on edge, where soldiers loyal to the north and south sometimes brawl in wood-shack bars. Situated near contested oil fields, the town is a barometer of how things are going between the government in Khartoum and the south, and often, things here have gone badly.

At the center of most of the trouble are the joint military units created by the 2005 peace deal, which ended decades of fighting rooted in southern claims of discrimination by a ruling Arab elite.

The units were supposed to make comrades of Sudanese government soldiers and the southern rebels known as the Sudan People's Liberation Army. In reality, though, the soldiers have never really integrated, especially in Malakal, where tensions have twice escalated into open warfare. In 2006, clashes between northern and southern forces left more than 150 people dead.

At that time and in the February incident, Tang figured prominently. A southerner whom people here describe as a charismatic but illiterate turncoat, he was the leader of one of the many local militia groups that fought as northern proxies during the war, blocking aid and burning villages -- the same technique the Sudanese government used in Darfur through local tribal militias known as the Janjaweed.

Southern officials had banned Tang after the 2006 incident, so when he landed at Malakal's airport in February saying he was just visiting family, reaction was swift. Tang was asked to leave, but he refused, triggering the fighting. Though he was eventually persuaded to depart, the February clash has caused a food shortage because traders are afraid to come to town, and the lack of security has delayed projects from boreholes to schools.

When she traveled to Malakal recently, Abuk Payiti Ayik, a member of southern Sudan's parliament, said she could sense the popular frustration.

"People were saying . . . we are not seeing peace and not seeing development," she said, adding that in her view, that is exactly the result Bashir's national ruling party had intended. "These people are trying by all means not to implement the peace agreement."

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/24/AR2009042403746.html?wprss=rss_world/africa