Author: Maggie Fick

As UN Dispatch noted this morning, it is a big week for Sudan. On Wednesday, the Abyei Arbitration Tribunal in The Hague is set to announce its much-anticipated decision on the disputed boundaries of Abyei— an oil-rich and contested region along the disputed North-South border within Sudan. The flurry of news on Abyei over the weekend demonstrated both the importance ascribed to the ruling inside Sudan and the tenuous nature of the Abyei dispute, which the International Crisis Group has called “the most volatile aspect” of Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA. Here’s a rundown of the latest on ...

Nasir is a southern Sudanese town on the Sobat River in Upper Nile state near the Ethiopian border. During Sudan’s second North-South civil war, which lasted for more than two decades, resulted in the deaths of nearly two million people, and displaced another four million people, Nasir was a key hub for Operation Lifeline Sudan, a major humanitarian effort coordinated by the United Nations that delivered services to the South from 1989 to 1997. The town also served as the base for a significant splinter faction of the SPLA, the southern guerilla army that fought the North in the civil ...

As we noted on Wednesday, a legal decision on the contested boundaries of Abyei—an oil-rich and contested region along the disputed North-South border within Sudan—is expected from the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s Abyei Tribunal next week. An article by AFP reporter Guillaume Levallee, writing from Abyei, highlights the tensions on the ground in Abyei in the run-up to next week’s ruling. Abyei's chief administrator Arop Mayok told AFP: People are concerned, people are afraid. They think that if the verdict is in favour of one of the parties, there will be problems, that the losing side may react negatively… Abyei ...

An insightful op-ed appeared in the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” online column yesterday. Nesrine Malik's op-ed responds to the news that police in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, arrested 13 women in a café on Monday and flogged 10 of them for wearing pants in public. Malik describes her own experiences growing up in the “new Khartoum”—after the National Salvation coup in 1989 which brought the National Islamic Front, now known as Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party, or NCP, to power. Malik says that, over the past few years, the “draconian public decency laws” enforced by the NCP have been relaxed in ...

Writing on Wired.com’s Danger Room blog recently, Nathan Hodge has a good scoop related to the increasingly frequent rumors of a mounting arms race between Sudan’s North and South in the run-up to the (twice-delayed) general elections scheduled for April 2010 and the southern self-determination referendum slated to occur in 2011 according to the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA. Hodge reports that the South is receiving “low-key”—in wonky terms “non-lethal”— military support from the United States. Hodge says that, according to a State Department official, State’s contract with security firm USIS is designed to: …take [the southern ...

UPDATE: An Enough Said reader wrote to me and noted that it is important to note that the UAE has been providing humanitarian relief and assistance in southern Sudan for some time. Read this recent article about the “Emirates World Humanitarian Mobile Hospital” that will soon go into operation “as part of the Red Crescent Authority's campaign to deliver curative and preventive services to the underprivileged patients in southern Sudan.” Thanks to this reader for passing along this story, and please keep the comments coming. ... Having recently returned from southern Sudan, an article in this week’s Economist caught my ...

The State Department issued a welcome announcement this afternoon regarding an important legal decision expected next week on the boundary of Abyei—an oil-rich and contested region in Sudan that sits along the disputed border between North and South: The United States calls on both parties to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) – the National Congress Party and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – immediately to prepare for the implementation of the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration panel in The Hague, expected on or about July 22. Measures include a readiness to implement fully the Court’s decision, to disseminate ...

Yesterday, Dr. Ghazi Salah Eddin Atabani—a top advisor to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who also manages the “Darfur dossier” for Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party—criticized President Barack Obama for calling the Darfur conflict a “genocide.” President Obama referred to the conflict as genocide on his first trip to Africa, during his speech to the Ghanaian parliament last Saturday in Accra. As John Norris noted on our blog yesterday, President Obama said: When there's a genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems - they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response. AP ...

Increasingly frequent reports of violent clashes, deaths of women and children, and subsequent bouts of displacement in southern Sudan must not be ignored or dismissed as unrelated incidents. As the Economist recently noted, these episodes amount to “a sign of a wider breakdown of peace across southern Sudan.” In early June, an attack by an armed Lou Nuer militia on a World Food Program river convoy carrying U.N. food aid reportedly killed at least 40 of the 150 southern soldiers acting as escorts. While intercommunal violence is not a new phenomenon in the southern Sudan, the attacks in 2009 have ...

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the National Congress Party’s dictatorial leadership of Sudan. For two decades under the rule of President Omar al-Bashir, the regime’s coercive divide-and-rule tactics have enabled it to manipulate and repress – instead of effectively govern and support – Sudan’s people. The results of the NCP’s brutal policies have been deadly; a powerful op-ed in the Guardian today tallied the results: In the past two decades, President Bashir has waged two civil wars, taking the lives of more than 2.6 million people, and displaced a further 6.5 million; he has funded murderous rebel armies in ...