SEPTEMBER 21, 1994

Associated Press

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) -- Sudan's leader warned that full-scale fighting could resume in his country's civil war following a failed effort to restart peace talks with southern rebels.

Lt. Gen. Omar el-Bashir said that the unilateral ceasefire his government declared in July was tied to progress in those negotiations, state radio reported Wednesday.

El-Bashir also said his country would accede to a federal system to end the 11-year civil war, but will not accept rebels' demands for a referendum on self-determination or on separating religion from the state.

He said the federal system the rebels demanded in 1974 was a major concession, as was exempting southern Sudanese from Islamic laws applied in northern Sudan.

The South is largely Christian and animist, while the government in Khartoum is Muslim fundamentalist.

More than a million people have died in fighting and famine since 1983, when the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army rebelled, demanding that southerners play a greater role in managing their own lives.

The fourth round of peace talks on the civil war sponsored by Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea collapsed two weeks ago.

NOVEMBER 7, 1994

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Sudan's fundamentalist government is reactivating Islamic rules that forbid men and women from dancing together and require females to dress modestly, a government newspaper reported Monday.

The al-Engaz al-Watani newspaper said the government also launched a campaign called "A Year Without Alcohol" and has raided illegal distilleries.

Shortly after it came to power in a military coup in 1989, the government of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan el-Bashir tried to force Sudan to conform to strict Islamic laws. Many of the rules were disregarded.

Islam forbids the use of alcohol, obliges women to dress modestly and strictly regulates interaction between the sexes.

In another development Sunday, the government accused the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army of violating a six-month truce in southern Sudan.

The country has been torn by an 11-year-old civil war between the Muslim majority government in the north and the Christian and animist minority in the south.

Both sides regularly accuse the other of violating the truce.

NOVEMBER 10, 1994

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) -- About 65,000 people were reported fleeing their homes in southern Sudan to escape increased fighting in their nation's 12-year-old civil war.

An estimated 50,000 Sudanese were believed traveling through jungles in the south in hopes of crossing into Uganda, Ulf Kristoffersson, Kampala representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said Thursday. He said his agency was stockpiling food in Uganda to prepare for the new arrivals.

The week-old fighting near the Sudanese border town of Nimule, 200 miles north of Kampala, is the latest confrontation between the Khartoum government and the southern rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army.

Uganda already is home to about 250,000 Sudanese, who have fled since the war began in 1983 between the mainly Arab and Muslim north and the black, animist and Christian south.

North of the Nimule area, 15,000 others were reported fleeing clashes between the rebel army and one of its breakaway factions, U.N. relief workers said. It was unclear where the refugees were headed because the border is hundreds of miles away.

Fighting between splinter rebel groups has been blamed for much of the carnage, homelessness and disruption in relief supplies in the past few years.

Foreign relief workers were evacuated last week for fear that rebel factional fighting would reach their area near Akon, 430 miles northwest of Nimule.

An estimated 1 million people have been killed or starved to death since the war started, and millions have been displaced as they abandoned their planting and herding areas to escape the war.

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