Ghost town at the centre of a nation’s future

Steve Bloomfield, Sunday Herald, December 13, 2008

ABYEI, Sudan - Shattered clay cooking pots lie in the dirt, surrounded by black and grey ash. The twisted, blackened metal legs of a bed frame poke out through the undergrowth. It is six months since Abyei, a town of 35,000 people on the border of north and south Sudan, was destroyed by government forces but still it remains a ghost town.

There are small changes. A handful of former residents have begun to return, gingerly erecting dirty white tents where once there were circular mud and wattle tukuls (huts). But there are few customers at the rebuilt tea houses and only a handful of women wandering the once-bustling fruit and vegetable market.

Instead, the majority of Abyei's inhabitants still live in rudimentary tarpaulin-covered straw shacks just a few miles south in villages such as Agok. Until the attack in May, Abyei had been growing every day.

Tens of thousands had left this area during the civil war. But in the three years since that war ended, many had come home. Nyaluak Ater, a 39-year-old dressed in a white patterned dress and a smart burgundy blazer, came home to Abyei just 14 days before the town was destroyed.

With her husband, John Manweer, and eight children, Nyaluak had dreamed of settling in the home town she hadn't seen for more than 20 years. They had built one large tukul with three bedrooms and a living room but everything was burnt to the ground.

The attack, which took place under the noses of a 200-strong UN peacekeeping battalion, signalled the fragility of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), a US-brokered deal which ended more than 20 years of civil war and which has been heralded as George W Bush's greatest foreign policy achievement.

Six months on, and with both north and south rearming ahead of a planned referendum on southern independence in 2011, analysts believe the peace deal will fall apart unless the issue of Abyei is resolved.

Yesterday, in the first significant violence since May, there were again reports that thousands of civilians were fleeing fighting in Abyei. The region is believed to be home to half of all of Sudan's oil - and the Khartoum government has refused to accept the findings of an independent commission which effectively places Abyei in the south.

Kuol Deng Kuol was one of the last to leave after May's attack. Abyei's paramount chief of the Dinka Ngok people, Kuol watched as his compound of more than 50 tukuls burned to the ground.

The problem is straightforward, Kuol said. "The NCP (president Omar al-Bashir's party) thinks Abyei is part of the north, Abyei people think it's part of the south. They want Abyei to not be a Dinka land. They want to chase us away from the area."

UN officials in the area had been warning about the dangers of an attack for months. But global attention on Sudan remained focused solely on Darfur. The UN's regional co-ordinator for south Sudan, David Gressley, said Western leaders had taken their eye off the ball.

"Very little political attention has been paid to the south," he said. "The signing of the peace agreement was the beginning of the process, not the end."

But following the signing of the CPA in January 2005 there was a "lack of engagement in what was going on here" by the international community, Gressley said. The local anger is not reserved solely for the Khartoum government.

The UN mission in Sudan (Unmis) has a base in Abyei that is home to around 200 peacekeepers. Under the terms of their deployment the peacekeepers are supposed to protect civilians.

UN officials point out that the unit in Abyei is lightly armed and probably would have been able to do little to prevent the violence once it had started. Privately, UN officials question whether their political leaders would have been willing to back them if they had killed a Sudanese soldier.

For John Manweer, that is little excuse. "Wherever there is an international force, there is protection," he said, more as a question than a statement. "You cannot bring an international force to come here and do nothing."

It was a view shared, vociferously, by a representative of the Dinka Ngok at a ceremony last month welcoming the global head of the UN's humanitarian operations, John Holmes.

"We need a new, impartial Unmis leadership with a new attitude to peace and readiness to support positive change processes," boomed Carlo Ayel to loud applause from an audience of 200 local leaders.

"Unmis Abyei has lost its acceptance to the local community."

Southern Sudan has experienced civil war for 40 of the last 50 years. One woman Holmes spoke to told him: "I was born in a crisis, lived through a crisis, now it looks like I will die in a crisis."

The events in Abyei did not just destroy the town, it may have also signalled the death knell for a united Sudan. Under the terms of the CPA, senior southern politicians joined a government of national unity with Bashir's NCP.

Relations between the two sides have been rocky, in particular over the issue of Sudan's oil revenues. Most of the oil fields are in the south but the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) claim that most of the funds have been kept by the north.

The coalition may not survive Sudan's first democratic elections in more than 20 years, which are due to take place next year. A final split could come two years later when a referendum is due to be held in the south on independence.

The debate within the SPLM over whether to push for independence or remain part of a united Sudan is ongoing. Independence has its attractions - building a new Sudan with a steady stream of oil revenue.

But a united Sudan would have greater economic power and broader political clout - both in Africa and the Middle East. It is a battle between hearts and heads, said Kuol - and the hearts appear to be winning.

Among the wider population opinion appears to be shifting towards independence. Secretive moves by the southern government to rearm appear to have been confirmed by September's capture by Somali pirates of the MV Faina, a ship carrying 33 Russian battle tanks.

Military analysts and diplomatic officials in Nairobi and Juba believe the tanks were destined for south Sudan. Government officials in Juba vociferously deny they are rearming. But among the former residents of Abyei there is wide support for such a move.

Very quietly, both sides appear to be preparing themselves for a confrontation. But getting world leaders to focus on more than one crisis in Sudan appears to be difficult. "We work in the shadow of Darfur," Gressley admitted.

The future of Darfur though, could lie in what rises from the ashes of Abyei.