Arbitrators to rule on disputed Sudan region

An international arbitration tribunal is ruling Wednesday on the boundaries of a disputed oil rich region on the border between northern and southern Sudan.

The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration's decision on the Abyei region's borders is seen as a major test of the fragile 2005 peace deal that ended more than 20 years of civil war that killed more than 2 million people in Sudan.

The deal created a unity government and gave the south a semiautonomous status, but left Abyei's borders and future status unresolved.

Abyei, with its rich oil reserves and grazing lands used by nomadic herders from the North and South, has suffered flare-ups of violence since the peace deal. The North and South asked the Hague-based arbitration panel to set its borders once and for all following a battle in May 2008 in which 22 northern soldiers were killed, most of the town of Abyei was burned to the ground and its 50,000 residents were forced to flee.

"Abyei is an issue over which both sides have demonstrated they will fight it out, and it very well could be the spark for a resumption of full-scale war," said Colin Thomas-Jensen, co-author of a new report by ENOUGH, a nongovernment group that works toward ending genocide and crimes against humanity.

Under the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA, the southern Sudanese are scheduled to hold a referendum in 2011 on whether to secede from the North or remain united. Abyei residents will hold a separate referendum that year to decide whether to join the North or South.

The North rejected a decision on Abyei's boundaries by a panel of experts in 2005, saying it had exceeded its mandate. That ruling gave most of the region's oil reserves to the South, said Paul Williams, a former State Department lawyer who represented the South at the arbitration hearings.

Williams says both sides have in recent weeks affirmed that they will abide by whatever decision the arbitration panel reaches. The panel's rulings are binding, but it has no enforcement powers.

"This will be enforced politically," Williams said Tuesday.

Maggie Fick of ENOUGH says it will have to be.

"If the Abyei dispute relapses into stalemate and violence, the already fragile CPA will be pushed to the breaking point," she said.

U.N. officials have reported that both northern and southern Sudanese troops have violated security arrangements aimed at keeping them out of Abyei.

Lawyers for the South argued in The Hague for a settlement similar to that of the 2005 boundary commission, while the northern government in Khartoum cited British colonial era maps to propose a northern boundary much further to the south _ a demarcation that would put the oil fields under Khartoum's control.

Whatever Wednesday's ruling, it will be a litmus test for the durability of the peace in a country ravaged for so long by war.

British Foreign Office Minister Mark Malloch Brown welcomed both sides' commitments to accept the arbitrators' ruling.

"Resolving the dispute over Abyei is a key part of the CPA and this decision should be an important step forward in ensuring peace and stability in the Abyei area," he said in a statement.

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Associated Press Writer Sarah El Deeb in Cairo contributed to this report.