After fighting the longest civil war in Africa, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is now fuming over the delay in negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.
Talks in the Kenyan town of Nairasha have been postponed until February 17 to allow Muslim negotiators such as Vice-President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha to attend the hajj.
SPLA spokesperson Samson Kwaje recalls, however, that the negotiations were stopped for a single day over Christmas because the parties were hoping for a comprehensive agreement by the end of January.
Disputes between the largely Muslim north and the Christian and animist south have fuelled the war in Africa’s largest country — which is more than twice the size of South Africa.
Now oil has added a new dimension to a country where war has raged for all but a decade since it gained independence from Britain in 1956.
Sudan is currently earning $2-billion a year from the 250 000 barrels of oil it pumps daily. Plans are in place to increase that to 500 000 barrels a day by next year, although industry analysts say this is excessively optimistic.
The oil discovery has put Sudan on the map as a potential success, rather than an apparent disaster.
Oil-starved China, India and Malaysia are currently heading the field in exploration and exploitation. But Shell, Exxon and Total are not far behind.
The United States is taking an intense interest in the Sudanese peace process, firstly because the country is a source of this vital commodity and secondly to neutralise any possibility of it becoming a haven for al-Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups.
Real hope for peace dawned in Sudan last month when the northern government and the rebel south signed an agreement to split the
oil wealth 50-50, with each contributing a small cut to the producing region.
The oil fields are mainly in the south but straddle the north-south divide. The two sides have agreed to draw up a new Constitution in six months and to give that founding document six years to be bedded down. At that stage, the south would be expected to have a referendum on its future.
Issues like the control of the Abjei, Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains districts remain to be negotiated. But even when these are settled, as SPLA political leader John Garang believes it will be, a number of local and regional hurdles loom.
Fighting in the western area of Darfur has intensified. In the past month 18 000 refugees from that area have fled into Chad, joining the 100 000 already there.
Refugees complain that the government is operating a scorched earth policy, destroying the crops and farms of those who have fled.
With two million dead and twice as many displaced by the war, a huge peace dividend is in the offing for the devastated south.
Journalists visiting the area are shocked at how people have survived in what is effectively a wasteland.
Matters are complicated by the fact that the major rebel group in Darfur is Muslim. In fact, the Muslim north and Christian south illustration is an over simplification. The northern government of Omar Bashir is in effect a small ruling clique and more than two million non-Muslims live in the capital, Khartoum.
Garang and his rebel leadership are themselves members of the minority Dinka tribe that will have its work cut out maintaining control if and when the south gains independence.
Kenya and Uganda, who have traditionally supported the SPLA, would be expected to support such a move. For Uganda, a Sudanese settlement that closes that country as a refuge for the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army would be a bonus.
A split Sudan would be abhorrent to the Arab League and its founding mission of Arab unity. It would be absolute anathema to Egypt to have yet another state along the Nile, which is its lifeline.
With a peace agreement in the bag, much of the energy of Garang and his leadership will have to be focused on developing and rebuilding.
Garang has persistently made bullish noises about the prospects for peace. However his supporters in the West continue to warn that the Sudanese government is talking peace but continuing to make war.
At this crucial time, they say, it is vital to check any bid by Khartoum to win at the negotiating table what it could not gain on the battlefield.
They accuse it of continued human rights violations in its determination to create a fundamentalist state throughout the country.