Word: sudanized
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...southern Sudan become an independent nation when it possesses so little of what defines one? Many aid workers and development experts in Juba doubt it can. They have coined a new term to describe its unique status: pre-failed state. In public, the international community tries to be more upbeat. But optimism is hard with so little time to prepare for separation. Southerners are expected overwhelmingly to choose to split Africa's largest country at a referendum on independence next Jan. 9, and David Gressly, the U.N.'s regional coordinator for southern Sudan, admits, "There is a lot of discussion...
...soak up those expat salaries. But it hardly suggests the improbable reality now dawning on the place: barring war, famine or genocide - and all are possible - in 10 months this sweltering, malarial shantytown will become the world's newest capital city in the world's newest country, South Sudan...
...premature birth presents complications. For southern Sudan, they could be particularly severe. Sudan is already one of the least stable countries on earth. This is where Osama bin Laden lived for five years in the 1990s; where the government has waged, in Darfur, what the Bush Administration called genocide; where the President, Omar al-Bashir, is the first head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court; and where 2 million people died in two civil wars between the south and the northern government in 1955-72 and between 1983 and 2005, conflicts that left the entire country...
...country born into that environment, which, say, did not have clearly defined borders, or had weak institutions, or was split internally, could spell disaster. "It could recreate the conditions for civil war," says Gressly. Major General Scott Gration, U.S. special envoy to Sudan, describes his task as ensuring "civil divorce, not civil war," and warns, "This place could go down in flames tomorrow. The probability of failure is great." (See a TIME video on the nun offering a refuge from violence in Sudan...
...choice did not always play well on South Sudan's streets. "Many people in the south wanted to vote for Yasir," says Moses Duku, a Juba motorbike taxi driver. "Who are we to vote for now?" But with prospects dimming for the realization of the CPA's vision of a new, united Sudan, many in the south are looking to the peace deal's final exit clause. "It's clearly mentioned in the CPA that you need the elections to happen," says Edmin Baba after casting his first ever vote. But, he adds, "the referendum, of course, for every southerner...