This blog was written by Noah Gottschalk, Senior policy advisor for humanitarian response.

The Republic of South Sudan will become the world’s newest country on July 9, just over three weeks from today. Casting a shadow over the celebrations that should mark South Sudan’s first independence day will be the situation along the new country’s border with the north.

Since I last wrote about the contested area of Abyei, from which the United Nations now estimates over 100,000 people have been displaced, the situation has deteriorated, with fighting spreading to neighboring South Kordofan. Latest reports indicate 6,000 people are seeking safe haven around the UN compound in the state capital Kadugli, with estimates of nearly 60,000 more displaced and unknown numbers seeking refuge in the Nuba Mountains, their exact whereabouts and condition unknown. To further complicate matters, ongoing violence and serious fuel shortages are making it harder for people to flee fighting and for aid groups to reach people in need. Higher fuel costs also mean higher commodity prices, a serious problem in a place where 90% of people live on less than one dollar a day.

While aid efforts are underway to assist people who have fled Abyei, the UN has been investigating why its peacekeepers were unable to prevent the crisis from escalating in the first place. Last week, General Babacar Gaye, the former commander of UN troops in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and currently the top adviser to the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) visited Sudan to find out for himself. His conclusions were damning. A spokesman said the peacekeepers “could have and should have had more visibility to deter any violence against civilians” and insisted that they would learn from these mistakes.

Discussions in New York over the coming weeks will have a big role in determining if this will actually happen. South Sudan will get a new UN Peacekeeping mission when it becomes a new country. At issue is whether the new mission prioritizes the protection of civilians from violence with a mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to physically intervene – with force if necessary – when civilians’ lives – including aid workers – are under threat. Some within the US government are reluctant to give the new mission the mandate to do so, worrying that it might be seen as undermining the new government of South Sudan. The reality, however, is that the new government, despite its laudable public commitments to protecting its people from violence, still needs support from the international community. The new government continues to work to transform its fighting forces into a professional army and to develop a civilian police service, and faces significant challenges in protecting southern Sudanese against the wide array of threats they face. North-South tensions are not the only such threats: civilians are also increasingly put at risk by violence between the SPLA and other armed groups, large scale clashes between communities, and the ongoing threat of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

As one of my colleagues working in Juba recently said, “Protection of civilians is an extremely complex, resource-intensive and politically sensitive task, one which arguably UNMIS was not set up to effectively do.” We can change that if the new mission gets it right from the start. It should have a mandate both to protect civilians from violence and to work with the new government to make it better able to protect its own people in the longer term, so in the future it can do so without a peacekeeping force.

In January, President Obama described the relatively peaceful referendum in which southern Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for secession as giving “the world renewed faith in the prospect of a peaceful, prosperous future for all of the Sudanese people — a future that the American people long to see in Sudan.” That future is at risk right now. But our government can and must make the right decisions to support the world’s newest country and its people, and to restore the hope we all felt just five months ago. Supporting a Chapter VII mandate is the best way to start.

This blog was written by Noah Gottschalk, Senior policy advisor for humanitarian response

Tensions are running high in Sudan, where an upsurge in violence in the border region of Abyei has displaced tens of thousands of people and raised fears of a return to all-out war.

With just over six weeks to go before South Sudan becomes the world’s newest country, the world’s focus has largely been on the incredible accomplishments of the largely peaceful referendum held last January to determine the future of Sudan. The results of that vote, which was a key provision of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended more than two decades of conflict, were overwhelmingly for secession, and southerners have been readying themselves for what they had hoped would be a peaceful independence day.

Yet with the violence in Abyei – an area roughly the size of Connecticut that was one of the worst-affected areas during the war and has long been seen as a key flashpoint of conflict –the security situation is on a knife-edge. The conflict in Abyei comes at a time when southern Sudan is facing its most violent year since the end of the civil war in 2005. Not including these recent events, over 1,400 people have been killed in southern Sudan so far this year – already more than in the whole of 2010 – and at least 117,000 have fled their homes, as violence has dramatically increased in recent months.

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The final results of the referendum in southern Sudan were released on February 7, with 98.83 percent of southerners voting for independence. The people in southern Sudan are jubilant. After years of fighting for self-determination the day has finally arrived; and it has finally come through a peaceful and credible democratic process.

That same day, Sudanese President Omer Hassan Al-Bashir wasted no time and officially accepted the final results. And President Obama offered a congratulatory statement and announced the intention of the United States to formally recognize Southern Sudan as a sovereign, independent state in July 2011.

Many southern Sudanese believe that independence will unlock a prosperous future for their children. They have heard promises from policymakers for years that the region will be transformed from one of the poorest places on earth to a breadbasket of Africa. Oxfam staff asked southern Sudanese about their hopes for the future. Watch the video below to see and hear what they had to say.

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By mid-February, the world will learn whether the people of southern Sudan voted to become the world’s 193^rd independent state. Initial results came out this week and it looks like the vote was overwhelmingly for succeeding from the Republic of Sudan and forming their own independent country.

The referendum on southern independence is a significant milestone in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Northern dominated National Congress Party and the southern led Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. The CPA brought a formal end to a devastating 22-year civil war that killed more than two million people and drove more than four million from their homes. The United States put a lot of effort into ensuring the referendum occurred on time and peacefully. Amazingly, the weeklong independence referendum, which ended on Jan. 15, was completed without violence or other any significant disruptions. The fact that the vote did not spur any major violence is no small feat in a country where the majority of people have spent most, if not all, of their lives living in a situation of armed conflict.
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