In Sudan, another conflict could eclipse Darfur

Abdul Rasool Al-Nour, a Messeriya Arab elder who helped to negotiate previous peace agreements between Dinka and Messeriya Arabs, says that the civil war has destroyed the trust between the two communities.

"This is a very dangerous situation, with the nomads fighting the Army of the SPLA," he says. "What we want is a new demarcation of the boundaries by a national committee. I'm hopeful, because I know the relations between the two tribes. I know how much each tribe needs each other. But we have the curse of the oil."

Oil has indeed raised the stakes, as the new boundaries selected by the US-led Abyei Boundary Commission have included a major oil field at Heglieg within the newly demarcated boundaries of Abyei. If the powerful Dinka community in Abyei were to decide in a 2011 referendum to join their southern Dinka brethren, all of that oil wealth could fall into Southern hands.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, signed between the northern government of Khartoum and the mainly southern breakaway SPLA, should have resolved all of this. But even after the two sides decided to form a joint Government of National Unity, distrust has remained. The distrust came to a head in December, when the entire delegation of SPLA ministers pulled out of the Khartoum government, in part over Abyei.

"I think the withdrawal of the SPLM [Sudanese People's Liberation Movement] ministers from government was an alarm bell, that if we did not wake up the two parties to observe the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, it will end," says Mansour Khaled, a senior member of the SPLM. "The results will be catastrophic for the whole of Sudan."

Abyei is just one of many points of contention between the two sides. Now politics is affecting relations between Dinkas and the Messeriya Arabs.

"There was an intermingling of traditions, of food, of forms of dress, of language," says Mr. Khaled. "Then, when you add the element of war, and the realignment of communities, the conflict took a different dimension, an ethnic dimension, a religious dimension, and of course, this is a very lethal thing."

According to the original plan, says parliament speaker Ghazi Salahuddin, the Abyei Boundary Commission was supposed to set the border according to a line demarcated by British colonial powers in 1905, which many Messeriya Arabs believe is the seasonal Bahr al-Arab river. Instead, the boundary commission experts couldn't find that boundary in the archival records, and unilaterally decided to locate it in a forested no man's land, which put the oil-rich town of Heglieg within Dinka hands.

"This was a good agreement, but the political reality is that the north regards Abyei as a Kuwait, and the south regards it as a Jerusalem, so we have a problem," says a senior Western diplomat, speaking on background. "So we should go back to arbitration. But right now, there is no progress on Abyei. This isn't a question of a glass half full or a glass half empty. There's no glass."

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