AU envoy in Sudan for crisis talks, Juba visit next

African Union envoy Thabo Mbeki is in Khartoum this week A South Sudanese official has said the United Nations should impose sanctions on Sudan for failing to obey a Security Council resolution calling for an end to hostilities and renewed bilateral negotiations.
Pagan Amum told Reuters on Friday that Khartoum had not complied with the May 2 resolution giving neighbours Sudan and South Sudan, under threat of sanctions, two weeks to resume talks over their differences, which boiled over into border clashes last month.
He said while South Sudan, which became the world\'s newest independent nation last year, had signalled its readiness to restart talks immediately, its neighbour had carried out air attacks after May 2 and had not moved to resume negotiations.
\"They have violated the timeline,\" Amum, secretary-general of South Sudan\'s ruling Sudan People\'s Liberation Movement (SPLM), said in an interview in the South Sudanese capital Juba.
He urged the UN Security Council to \"impose sanctions now and take measures against Khartoum\".
A spokesman for Sudan\'s Foreign Ministry said Amum\'s remarks were \"unfortunate\" and accused the south of violating the Security Council resolution by continuing its \"aggression\" in Sudan\'s territory.
Amum also criticised the United Nations and the African Union for failing to deal firmly with Sudan, which he said routinely defied the international community.
\"The UN sees it as normal for (Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-) Bashir to bomb and kill the people of South Sudan. The conscience of the international community is not pricked ... they are used to it, it has become normal,\" he complained.
\"We are going to ask them, \'What are you going to do?\"
He said he had written to former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who is in Khartoum as head of the AU panel tasked with resolving the north-south disputes, asking when the negotiations with Khartoum would restart but had not so far received a response.
El-Obeid Morawah, Sudan\'s foreign ministry spokesman, said: \"I think it is better for them (South Sudan) and for us to put the negotiations first.\"
Amur said the international community only reacted when South Sudanese forces, in what he called self-defence, occupied the disputed Heglig oil region, as the two armies clashed on their border last month.
South Sudan claims the oilfield falls within its territory, but the exact location of the border still had not been decided when the South became an independent nation last July, taking most of the united country\'s oil with it.
Under international pressure, South Sudan withdrew from Heglig.
Mbeki arrived in Khartoum on Thursday in an attempt to restart negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan. He was accompanied by deputy mediator and former president of Burundi, Pierre Buyoya, to meet president al-Bashir and begin preparations for talks.
The foreign secretary of the Sudanese national congress, Ibrahim Ghandour, received the envoys at Khartoum Airport. He later reiterated Sudan\'s call for making security the top of the agenda for the negotiations, saying it was part of Security Council and the African Union resolutions.
Gandour also said the AU officials would meeti with first vice president Ali Osman Mohammed Taha before leaving for Juba to hold similar consultations with the South Sudanese leadership.
According to a United Nations Security Council resolution, talks aimed at resolving the dispute should have started this week.
South Sudan said it is prepared to talk without preconditions, while Sudan has said it wants negotiations to focus on security.
 At a meeting of the Security Council on Thursday, members adopted a resolution demanding the finalisation of a jointly-run administration and police force for the disputed border region of Abyei near Heglig.
Unlike South Sudan, Sudan has refused to withdraw its army from Abyei, citing the need to form an administrative body in the area.
The United Nations has said that unless the border question and other issues are resolved within the next three months, it will consider imposing sanctions.
For that, the two countries need to sit round the negotiating table, but the latest round of fighting has derailed talks.
The two countries are also still to agree on what rights their citizens should have in the other - some 500,000 Southerners are now foreigners in Sudan, along with some 80,000 northerners in the South.
A deadline for a group of some 15,000 Southerners to leave Sudan expires on Sunday - the first group has already started flying to the South, a country some of them had never visited before.
Presidential assistant Nafie Ali Nafie, meanwhile said insurgents in Darfur had no reason to hold arms against the government, but were implementing a foreign agenda that \"serves Israeli plots and Western circles\".