600 Reported Slain in Sudan Battles : Ethnic conflict: Non-Muslim farm workers are killed by Arabs after a fatal dispute over the length of Christmas vacation.

At least 600 people, including women and children, were killed in clashes last week between Muslim Arabs and non-Muslim southerners in central Sudan, foreign diplomats and relief workers said Thursday.

Sudanese rebels, reporting on the same clashes, said in a radio broadcast that local militia forces killed more than 2,000 people in the central Sudanese town of El Jebelein.

The diplomats and relief officials, citing reports from the area, said the clashes erupted when a southern Sudanese farm laborer killed his Muslim employer in a row over the length of the Christmas vacation for Christian laborers from the south.

Several truckloads of armed Arabs later went to a shantytown housing the workers and their families and began to set their shacks ablaze. Those who managed to escape the fires were gunned down by Arabs surrounding the area, they said.

The diplomats said most of the victims were from southern Sudan. They belonged to the Nilotic Shiloks which, together with the Nuir and Dinka tribes, are the main ethnic groups in southern Sudan.

The Shiloks live mainly in the southern Upper Nile region, whose northern border is about 30 miles south of El Jebelein where the killings last Thursday took place.

El Jebelein is 220 miles south of Khartoum in the White Nile province, where many southerners have settled in recent years after escaping famine and fighting between troops and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

A police statement broadcast Thursday on state radio said 186 people were killed in the clashes, which it said were sparked by an isolated incident.

Earlier, the clandestine radio of the SPLA, fighting in the non-Muslim south since 1983, said the killings were carried out by Arab militiamen recruited and armed by the government, which it accused of complicity.

The provinces of White Nile, Blue Nile, South Darfur and South Kordofan, stretching across Sudan from the Ethiopian border in the east to Chad in the west, have seen a series of massacres of southerners made refugees by the six-year-old civil war in their region.

Arab militias fighting the SPLA on behalf of the government are active in the four provinces and, according to diplomats, are responsible for the massacres.

The military government of Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir says Arab inhabitants of those areas had no choice but to arm themselves after repeated SPLA attacks.