Sudanese Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem told Reuters that Khartoum "categorically denied" Rice's allegations. He added that it was US arms sales that were making the world less safe, not weapons from his oil-rich African nation. UN officials have said privately that they, too, suspect the north was supplying southern militants with weapons.
The oil-producing nation's north and south fought each other for more than two decades until a 2005 peace deal that promised national elections, due in April, and a referendum on southern independence in January 2011. Armies from both sides, and an array of rebel groups and militias, are also stockpiling arms ahead of any conflict, despite UN and European Union arms embargoes, according to a December 2009 report by the Small Arms Survey.
The Enough Project, a US-based anti-genocide group, has been saying for months that increasingly sophisticated attacks by the same ethnic-based militias that were used by Khartoum in the south during the civil war was cause for great alarm. The Sudanese envoy also reacted angrily to comments from the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who said this week that he expected a genocide charge soon against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.