A spokesman for the Sudanese army has rebuffed United Nations plans to station peacekeepers on the border between northern and southern Sudan in the run-up to a contentious referendum in January, the Sudan Tribune reported Saturday.
A deployment on the demarcation line to the partly autonomous southern region is not covered by the mandate of the U.N. Missions in Sudan (UNMIS), Al-Sawarmi Khalid Sa’ad was quoted as saying.
He added that the Sudanese army can ensure security in the country on its own.
U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy had announced the planned deployment a day earlier, saying that it is designed to prevent violent incidents in hotspots during the January 9 poll, which will decide over independence for the southern part of the country.
The exact location of the border in the oil-rich region has been one source of tension between the north and the south. Skirmishes have repeatedly erupted along the demarcation line despite a 2005 peace treaty between the two halves of the country.
The referendum is a key piece of the peace treaty, which ended two decades of civil war that had left more than 2 million people dead.
Some 10,000 UNMIS soldiers and police officers are stationed in Sudan. Peacekeepers affiliated with the U.N. and African Union have also been deployed in the conflict-plagued western Darfur region.
