Referendum Dispute in Sudan Threatens Peace Accord
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Sudan’s border region of Abyei is bracing for conflict as a deadlock over a referendum to decide the area’s status is straining a U.S.-brokered peace agreement in 2005 that ended Africa’s longest-running civil war.
Abyei’s residents are scheduled to decide in a Jan. 9 plebiscite whether to join Sudan’s north or south. The ballot is now in jeopardy, with President Umar al-Bashir’s government in Khartoum, the capital, and the former rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in the south, unable to agree on who can vote.