Word: oils
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Permanent Court of Arbitration's remapping of the Abyei region reduces its size by more than a third. The new borders award several major oil fields to the north Sudanese government of President Omar al-Bashir but also make it more likely that the region will become part of south Sudan when the people of Abyei vote on their future in 2011. (See pictures of Darfur descending into chaos...
...when the north and south signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the war, they could not agree on the fate of Abyei, a region that sits along the hazy border and is home to several oil fields and an oil pipeline. In a bid to settle the dispute, negotiators drew up clear boundaries for Abyei, put it under joint administration and planned a 2011 referendum for its people to decide their region's fate. (Read "Sudan's Leader Shuts Down Aid Groups...
...political compromise, but it is certainly in line with compromises that have been imposed in the past," says Douglas Johnson, a Sudan scholar who has advised the south Sudanese and who was in the original group of experts that determined Abyei's boundaries. "By excluding [some of] the oil fields, it removes the main objection that Khartoum had to this...
...south may have gotten what it wanted too. For one thing, independent experts - including the International Crisis Group - say that the oil fields now falling to the north are nearly depleted, and the south has many others within its borders anyway. For another, the new boundary excludes several towns from Abyei that are mostly inhabited by Arabs. This means that when Abyei holds its referendum in 2011 on whether to join the north or the south, it will more likely go to the south - Arabs are allied with the north, while the Dinka tribesmen who make up the rest...
...While Abyei is the focus of everyone's attention today, it's only one of a host of contentious issues that the parties are facing, not least of which is the demarcation of the entire north-south border, which has many other oil fields," says Colin Thomas-Jensen, a policy adviser at the Washington-based Enough Project, who has written extensively on Sudan. "We've seen a lot of rhetoric and commitments on both sides, and that's positive. But there's a history in this region of saying one thing and doing another...