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| July 23, 2009 |
The decision regarding Abyei
It was a sad day for south Sudan.The Abyei region, with its oil fields and grazing lands, has been used by nomadic herders from the north and south. Abyei itself was attacked and burned to the ground in May 2008 by the northern (Khartoum's) army.
Both the northern government and semiautonomous south asked the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration to set the region's permanent borders after the 2008 battle in which 50,000 Abyei residents were forced to flee.
Yesterday, the five-member panel affirmed, in a four-one decision, the northern boundary as set by a 2005 commission, but drew new lines in the east and west that placed the Heglig oil fields and the Nile oil pipeline under control of the Khartoum government. The Heglig field was first developed in 1996 and is operated by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, with shares owned by companies from China, Malaysia and India.
Of course Khartoum celebrated the victory. Dirdeiry Mohamed Ahmed, the head of the northern government delegation, said,
"We welcome the fact that the oil fields are now excluded from the Abyei area, particularly the Heglig oil field", he said.
In a scathing dissenting opinion, Jordanian judge Awn Al-Khasawneh chastened the methods of his tribunal colleagues for trying too hard to reach a compromise, putting the deal on legally shaky ground. The award should be left "to the sand on which it has been built". He expressed concern that the decision could lead to future conflict because, among other things, it deprived an important tribe, the Misseriya, of critical water sources.
The 2005 peace deal created a unity government and gave the south a semiautonomous status, but left Abyei's borders and future status unresolved. It called for the southern Sudanese 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 South gave up the oil field in the hope of buying peace.