South Sudan supporters clash with police

South Sudan independence supporters clashed with riot police and pro-unity campaigners in Khartoum on Saturday as tensions mounted three months ahead of a referendum on southern secession.

The confrontation, pitting police against a group of up to 40 southerners, came as news emerged that south Sudan's president had asked UN Security Council envoys to deploy peacekeepers along the tense north-south border before the vote.

The oil-producing south was promised the referendum as part of a 2005 peace deal to end decades of civil war.

But Saturday's clashes highlighted the risk that simmering tensions over the vote could boil over, prompting a new conflict between the Muslim north and the south, where most of the population follow Christianity and traditional beliefs.

Riot police beat the group of southerners after they turned up at a 2,000-strong rally in support of Sudan's President Omar Hassan Al Bashir, timed to coincide with the visit of Security Council envoys to the capital, a Reuters witness said.

The southern protesters, most wearing orange caps and T- shirts, arrived at the rally shouting pro-independence slogans, witnesses said.

Riot police moved in after pro-unity supporters approached the southerners in downtown Khartoum, shouted at them to leave and pushed towards them.

Police beat the southerners with their fists and batons and arrested some of them, witnesses said. Officials also hit three Westerners, two of them journalists, as they ordered them to leave the scene.

Security Council envoys, including Washington's UN Ambassador Susan Rice, were scheduled to meet Sudan's foreign minister in another part of downtown Khartoum at the same time as the protest.

The UN delegation took another route into town and did not come close to the protest, said UN spokesman Ashraf Eissa.

A diplomat with the delegation told Reuters earlier that Salva Kiir, president of semi-autonomous south, had made the peacekeeper request at a meeting in the southern capital Juba on Wednesday.

"Salva Kiir asked for UN peacekeepers to be deployed along the border between the north and the south," the diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

The diplomat said the request would be considered but that no promises had been made. Another diplomat with delegation said a deployment was not something explicitly called for in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and would therefore require some "adjustments".

The UN has 10,000 peacekeepers stationed in Sudan, not counting its joint mission with the African Union in Darfur, most of them in the south and three former civil war battleground areas along the border.

Southerners, embittered by the conflict and perceived northern exploitation, are widely expected to choose secession. Khartoum wants to keep Africa's largest country united.

Troops from both sides have clashed since the accord, most recently in the contested Abyei oil region. The two sides have also accused each other of building up troops near their shared border as the referendum approaches.

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