South Sudan says army seeking new civil war

[David]

JUBA, Sudan (AFP) – An official of the semi-autonomous region of south Sudan on Wednesday accused the national army of seeking to provoke "a new civil war," following clashes in the town of Malakal.

Fighting erupted on Tuesday between former rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which now runs south Sudan, and supporters of Gabriel Tang, a former militia leader who fought alongside the Sudanese army in the 1983-2005 civil war.

Tang supporters, or Tangginyang, have been incorporated into Khartoum's regular forces, joining a mixed north-south unit patrolling areas which are still sensitive four years after the end of the war which caused two million deaths.

"We think Tangginyang have been used to unleash another civil war in South Sudan," Gabriel Changson Chang, south Sudan's information minister, said in a statement.

"His forces (Tang's) opened fire on the SPLA, which had to respond and a battle inevitably began," Chang said. Civilians were displaced and killed by the violence, he said without giving the number of victims.

Tang has been based in Khartoum since 2006, after clashes between his men and the former SPLA soldiers of the south Sudan administration left more than 100 dead in Malakal.

He returned this week to the town near the border between the northern and southern regions of Sudan.

But in a Khartoum news conference on Wednesday, Tang denied the south Sudan allegations.

"A member of my family died and I had to go there," he told reporters, wearing military uniform.

Tang said that after he arrived in Malakal UN peacekeepers asked him to leave because the SPLA did not want him there. He then said he was attacked by the SPLA and that Sudanese soldiers defended him.

Malakal has had one of the more fragile security situations since the 2005 peace deal ended the civil war between the Arab- and Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian or animist, non-Arab south.

Nine people were killed around the town in inter-ethnic clashes on January 9.