President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan said he would not recognize South Sudan as an independent state if it claimed the oil-producing border region of Abyei, deepening a political crisis ahead of the planned July split.
"If there is any attempt to secede Abyei within the borders of the new state we will not recognize the new state," President Bashir told a crowd on Thursday in the Southern Kordofan state in a televised speech.
South Sudan voted in January to split from the north, formally ending decades of civil war. Mr. Bashir, 67, had said he would be the first to recognize the new nation.
Last week, a draft interim constitution for the south was presented to southern president Salva Kiir at a ceremony in Juba, explicitly stating that Abyei fell within the territory of south Sudan, as confirmed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2009, according to Agence-France Presse.
Abyei was due to vote in a simultaneous referendum in January on whether to join the north or south, but north-south disputes over who could vote derailed that ballot and talks over the status of the region have stalled.
Analysts fear Abyei has the potential to reignite the north-south conflict if left unresolved and both sides have built up troops and heavy weapons in the underdeveloped region, according to satellite images and the United Nations, Reuters said.
Sudan’s north and south have fought for all but a few years since 1955 over oil, ethnicity, religion and ideology. The conflict claimed some 2 million lives and destabilized much of east Africa.
Sudan’s total population is estimated at 42 million, including 8.5 million in the south.