An international tribunal redefined the borders of a disputed oil-rich region between north and south Sudan on Wednesday. The ruling seeks to defuse a thorny issue in the 2005 peace agreement ending one of Africa’s longest civil wars by splitting the contested zone between the two sides.

This Wednesday, July 22, peace in Sudan will face a great test. Many speculate that if the Comprehensive Peace Agreement is not respected, if it faces barriers to its implementation (and Abyei is its greatest), then armistice will be almost impossible to broker in Darfur, and the whole region will once again descend into a war from which it only recently emerged.

THE HAGUE (AFP) – The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague started hearing a dispute Saturday between north and south Sudan over the contested oil-rich Abyei region at the heart of a fragile peace pact.
“Everybody in Sudan has a vested interest in the outcome of this arbitration,” Riek Machar Teny, deputy chairman of [...]