People in Abyei, a disputed area in Sudan, celebrated a ruling by a court in The Hague on Wednesday to redraw the borders.
An international tribunal redefined the borders of a disputed oil-rich region between north and south Sudan on Wednesday. The ruling seeks to defuse a thorny issue in the 2005 peace agreement ending one of Africa’s longest civil wars by splitting the contested zone between the two sides.
In its ruling, the tribunal, seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, overruled a decision by an international commission that Sudan’s government rejected four years ago.
The new ruling includes important concessions for both sides, giving the government in the north control of the region’s richest oil fields, but consolidating control of the remaining region under the Ngok Dinka, an ethnic group loyal to southern Sudan and likely to vote to join it in a coming referendum.
Both sides in the conflict — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s government in the north, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which controls the semiautonomous south — said Wednesday that they would accept the ruling, which was hailed by representatives of the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.
“Both parties have agreed that this question is now settled,” the United Nations special representative in Sudan, Ashraf Qazi, said Wednesday in a statement from the contested region, known as Abyei.
The ruling removes a major roadblock to a 2011 referendum on self-determination for the south, the final stage of a six-year peace agreement that stopped the war between the north and the south in 2005, after more than two decades of fighting.
Redrawing the borders of the region, the ruling gives the north uncontested rights to rich oil deposits like the Heglig oil field, which had previously been placed within Abyei.
But the decision leaves at least one oil field in Abyei and gives a symbolic victory to the Ngok Dinka, affirming their claims to the heartland of the fertile region.
“Who controls Abyei has taken on a symbolic importance beyond the traditional tensions over oil,” said Colin Thomas-Jensen, an analyst on Sudan with the Enough Project, a group that aims to stop genocide. “If the two sides can’t make Abyei work, the risk rises that the north and south will go back to war.”
The largely Muslim Arab north and the largely Christian and animist south have fought two civil wars since Sudan’s independence in 1956, the most recent lasting more than 20 years. An estimated two million people were killed and some four million displaced in the two decades before the 2005 treaty.
Abyei became a microcosm of the larger issues dividing the north and the south. Two sets of ethnic groups — the Muslim Arab Misseriya loyal to the government, and the largely animist and Christian Ngok Dinka — live in the area. It is rich in oil and sits on the border between the north and the south, an area with many other places that remain under contention and were not settled by Wednesday’s ruling.
Recent disputes over the region led to a May 2008 battle in which most of the town of Abyei was burned to the ground and 50,000 residents were forced to flee. After that flare-up, the north and the south agreed to bring the question of Abyei’s borders to the arbitration panel in The Hague.
By tightening the borders of Abyei and effectively placing many of its Misseriya Arab residents in northern territory, the ruling makes it far more likely that the region will vote to join southern Sudan in a 2011 referendum on its final status, experts said. In a separate referendum, the south will vote on whether to secede from Sudan.
Experts warned that serious issues remained in enforcing Wednesday’s decision. For now, the border remains a straight line on a map, and the hard work of cutting across grazing lands and other holdings must begin.
“In principle, the ruling makes both sides relatively happy, but we don’t know what will happen with the implementation,” said Fabienne Hara, a vice president at the International Crisis Group.
Until the 2011 referendum on self-determination, Abyei will formally remain a part of northern Sudan, presenting security concerns for ethnic groups loyal to the south. Renewed violence is a possibility. “The U.N. has to step up and demonstrate that they can keep the peace,” said Mr. Thomas-Jensen, the analyst on Sudan.
The United States and the European Union issued a joint statement urging both sides to follow the ruling immediately: “Both parties must use their authority and influence to ensure that the court’s decision is respected and peacefully implemented.”
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The ruling can be found at: http://www.pca-cpa.org/showpage.asp?pag_id=1306
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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/africa/23sudan.html?hp
