Preparing to vote in South Sudan. (Photo Courtesy Tim McKulka)

Nairobi — The demarcation of a clear North-South Sudan border remains unresolved five years past the deadline set by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the country's decades-long civil war.

Besides hindering implementation of the CPA over the years, a new policy briefing paper prepared by the International Crisis Group, says that the undefined boundary has fuelled mistrust between Khartoum and the Government of South Sudan and contributed to heightened anxiety in the border area.

At the centre of the deadlock are the rich natural resources, including oil deposits; commercial agriculture schemes and grazing lands valuable to pastoralists that inhabit the area.

This has further complicated the anticipated political and economic implications of the demarcation, considering that both governments rely heavily on revenue generated from these oil resources, whose daily production is estimated at about 470,000 barrels.

The Technical Border Committee that was set up by the presidency, and supported by national and regional experts, to draw the line between the regions as it stood at Independence Day in 1956, has exhausted deliberations, which work, the paper notes, was plagued by a "poisoned atmosphere."

The insistence on retracing the Independence Day border is influenced by strategies perpetrated by successive Khartoum regimes, using militias and security forces, to push the internal border south and displacing populations to assert control over the coveted area.

The committee has been unable to meet the deadlines after multiple extensions, a task that has been greatly hampered by the absence of a map that accurately depicts the north-south boundary at Independence.

In addition to confirming the respective territories, the original border line will have direct bearing on implementation of other aspects of the peace agreement, such as the population census, voter registration and redeployment of Khartoum's army (the Sudan Armed Forces) and the former rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army.

"While most of the border has been agreed on, five specific areas are disputed on technical grounds; still others remain contested in the public arena," the paper says, adding that the current impasse can be resolved, not by technocrats, but the political leadership in Khartoum and Juba; and need not await the outcome of the referendum.

The International Crisis Group proposes the formation of an agency to implement the demarcation, with the participation of the United Nations, and act upon renewed commitments to resume demarcation in the undisputed areas.

This is borne out of the fact that the CPA does not provide guidance on procedures or timelines for the complex processes of delineation and physical demarcation.

Nonetheless, the organisation's Horn of Africa Analyst, Zach Vertin, says that finding a solution to the border is more than just drawing a line, and would also define the nature and management of the border, and future relations of communities on either side.

"Completing these two tasks would go a long way toward preventing the border from becoming a source of renewed conflict in the post-CPA era" Vertin adds.

Already, as the clock ticks towards the January 2011 referendum, anxiety is building over the possible outcome that could see either the Southern Sudanese seceding or deciding to remain united with the north.

Communities living in the border area are said to be living in fear, since the border issue poses a threat to their livelihood.

The policy briefing paper proposes joint effort between the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) to allay these fears in the ongoing post-referendum negotiations that kicked off in July this year.

It indicates that the type of border and its exact location could become bargaining chips in a set of trade-offs that will undoubtedly define these negotiations.

Regardless of the referendum outcome, it says, the parties should agree on a broad framework for cross-border arrangements, one that addresses citizenship, cross-border movement and seasonal migration, economic activity and security.

Such a framework would allow space for local agreements, besides establishing a channel through which border communities can feed directly in to the negotiations on cross-border arrangements. The level of involvement of local actors would influence the stability achieved.

"Progress toward a mutually-beneficial package may lessen the potential impact of where exactly the disputed boundary is drawn in the end," argues Vertin.