Focus on Sudan at UN General Assembly

On the second day of the high-level meeting of the 65th UN General Assembly, world leaders are focussing on averting renewed conflict in the lead up to the an independence referendum for southern Sudan.

Preparations for a January vote are well behind schedule, and there are fears that a vote to secede will lead to violence given the south’s substantially known oil resources.

Earlier this week, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki told the U.N. General Assembly's annual ministerial meeting that the leaders from Northern and Southern Sudan reaffirmed their commitment to resolve all outstanding issues and accept the outcome of the vote.

“There is the issue of the debt, there is the issue of the Nile water,” describes Fouad Hikmat, the International Crisis Group's special adviser on Sudan. “There is the issue of the one third of the population of Sudan who live along the Savannah Belt, which is actually divided by the boarders of 1956 between the south and the north.”

Hikmat also says that there are tribes that live around the boarder near Abyei who, under a special protocol by the International Court of Arbitration, move some 2 million cattle from north to south for nine months out of the year.

“If these people feel that the boarders are going to be […] hard boarders, they might not have the right to vote during the referendum of Abyei,” Hikmat says, “and they might shoot the first bullet – or anybody from the other side who might stop their cattle from going down because of the tension around the referendum.” Hikmat fears that such a situation could escalate and derail the whole comprehensive peace agreement.