October 12, 2011 (CAIRO) – Sudan’s vice-president Ali Osman Mohamed Taha has accused the Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni of seeking to change the regime in Khartoum as part of his broader agendas to halt Arab advances in Africa.

Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni

Taha made his remark on Monday while addressing a symposium in Cairo where he started a visit this week and held talks with Egypt’s Prime Minister Isam Sharaf.

According to Taha, the Ugandan leader publicly declared his intentions at an event held in New York last year when he spoke about a movement by the marginalized regions in Sudan to change the center of power in Khartoum on the pretexts of neglect and inequality in development.

Taha was probably referring to a meeting organized by the UN on 27 September 2010 in New York to discuss South Sudan’s referendum on independence, which at the point was scheduled to take place four months later.

In that meeting, Museveni reportedly said that the problem in Sudan was that some groups were trying to run the state as an Arab country and disregard Africans while Sudan was an Afro-Arab country.

Sudan’s relationship with Uganda has been defined by veiled animosity over Kampala’s support for South Sudan’s secession and the fact that some rebel leaders from Sudan’s western region of Darfur have recently moved their bases to Uganda.

Khartoum’s alleged support in the past for the Ugandan rebels Lord Resistance Army (LRA) has also cast a shadow of mistrust between the former neighbors.

Taha’s tirade of accusations also extended to the ousted Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and the former vice-president of Yemen, Ali Salim al-Beidh, saying that both had contributed to South Sudan’s secession by providing military support to the southern guerrilla movement-turned-ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).

According to Taha, the first consignment of weapons the SPLM received came from Qaddafi while the second came from Al-Beidh.

South Sudan seceded from the north in July this year following a referendum in which southerners voted overwhelmingly for independence.

The vote was promised under a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil wars between the SPLM and the north.

(ST)