KHARTOUM (AFP) - Southern Sudan soldiers on Monday shot and wounded a UN military observer and a northern Sudanese army monitor on the edge of an oil-rich border area where recent fighting sparked fears of civil war.

The United Nations said the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) shot the two officers in Agok, which lies on the southern perimeter of the Abyei area where UN agencies concentrated relief efforts after fighting in May.

The shooting came as Vice President Ali Osman Taha and southern Vice President Riek Machar signed an agreement transferring the Abyei dispute to international arbitration in The Hague, said officials on both sides.

The case will go to the Netherlands as early as next week, said SPLM deputy secretary general Yasser Arman. The Hague body which will be tasked with resolving the dispute is the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

North and south are discussing the make up an interim administration for Abyei but last month agreed international arbitrators would settle the dispute over who controls the oil-rich district.

The UN secretary general's representative in Sudan, Ashraf Qazi, strongly condemned Monday's shooting and called on the main southern political party, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Qazi called in a statement for the shooting not to impede implementation of a roadmap agreement on Abyei between former warring north and south Sudan that he called "vital" to maintaining the three-year peace process.

In keeping with the June 8 roadmap, troops from the SPLA and northern Sudan Armed Forces are leaving Abyei so that joint patrols can restore security after the fighting flattened Abyei town, just to the north of Agok.

The clashes between SAF and SPLA troops in May killed at least 89 people and displaced more than 30,000.

They were seen as the biggest threat to the fledgling peace process that ended 21 years of civil war between north and south in 2005 after more than 1.5 million people were killed.

In 2011, Abyei is to hold a referendum on whether to retain its special administrative status in the north or join the south, which could decide in a separate referendum to secede from the north.

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