Special Reports Sudan, S. Sudan create border checkpoints
KHARTOUM, Sudan, Sept. 19 (UPI) — The governments of Sudan and South Sudan announced plans to establish checkpoints along their shared border and set up multilateral security response teams.
Sudan and South Sudan agreed to set up 10 checkpoints that would extend along their 1,300-mile border. A team composed of six soldiers from each country would join six of their Ethiopian counterparts to investigate skirmishes as well, the official Sudan News Agency reports.
Authorities from South Sudan said bilateral talks were moving in the right direction. Defense officials in Khartoum, meanwhile, said a formal committee was set to start examining border violence once both sides agree to the locations of the checkpoints.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that more than 80,000 people have been displaced since fighting broke out between Sudanese forces and fighters in the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North along the border. An estimated 20,000 fled the country to neighboring Ethiopia this year.
Human rights groups said there was evidence of mass graves and other atrocities associated with the border violence along the border between Sudan and South Sudan. The United Nations had said some of the violence appears to be ethnically motivated, a charge the government in Khartoum denies.
South Sudan became an independent state in July as part of a comprehensive peace agreement that ended one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.
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