"Sudan is sliding toward violent breakup and time is running out," says Fouad Hikmat, Sudan adviser for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based conflict-resolution organization.

The country, he warns, faces a return to all-out civil war if the international community does not intervene to ensure the full implementation of the 2005 agreement between the Khartoum government and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement.

These include a referendum on southern self-determination to be held in January 2011. In the meantime, the country's first multi-party elections since 1986, with parliamentary and regional ballots alongside a presidential election, are scheduled for April.

"Less than 13 months remain to ensure that national elections and the south's self-determination referendum lead to democratic transformation and stability in the country," Hikmat warned.

The referendum is expected to produce a vote for the south's independence despite the difficulties the war-ravaged region, where most of the civil war fighting occurred, will face in trying to set up a stable and viable state.

That will not sit well with the Arab-dominated Muslim government in Khartoum because most of Sudan's oil reserves, estimated at 6 billion barrels and the nation's main source of revenue, either lie in the south or in disputed territory between north and south.

The regime of President Omar al-Bashir will not easily relinquish these areas to the southerners, who are mainly Christians and animists with nothing in common with the northerners.

On top of that, the 22 years of war has left deep scars and hatreds. More than 2 million people perished during the conflict, many of them from the repeated famines that swept the south.

Another 4 million were driven from their homes in the multifaceted conflict that was fought over resources, religion, ethnicity and ideology.

Maj. Gen. Salah Abdullah Gosh, the former head of the regime's intelligence services accused of committing genocide in the war-ravaged Darfur region, warned on Jan. 11 that unnamed regional powers were out to destabilize Sudan.

He claimed that the threat of orchestrated violence hung over the upcoming elections.

Gosh, who is currently Bashir's security adviser, did not say who would be behind the violence. But there were suspicions he was probably setting the stage to justify a pre-election government crackdown.

The south has been seething for some time. According to Western relief agencies active in the south, some 2,500 people were killed there in 2009 and an estimated 350,000 fled their homes, raising the specter of war once again.

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement spelled out how a government of national unity comprising the Khartoum-based National Congress Party and the southern SPLM would deal with such sensitive issues as wealth- and power-sharing, north-south border demarcation and deployment of military forces over a six-year transitional period.

But few of these issues have been adequately addressed or settled, and relief organizations and diplomatic observers report growing volatility in the oil-rich border regions, with government troops moving in to control oil facilities.

This is particularly evident in the strategic Abyei region that straddles the north-south border and which the SPLM claims.

According to U.S.-based global security consultancy Stratfor, "While southern Sudan could end up voting in favor of secession, Khartoum maintains a de facto veto in the use of military force to keep southern Sudan (and more importantly, oil-rich regions such as Abyei) locked into union with the north."

The International Crisis Group declared that the "negotiations between President Bashir's NCP and the SPLM cannot achieve an all-Sudan peace. Both want elections, but for the wrong reasons."

"Bashir's party wants to re-establish its political legitimacy, the SPLM to ensure that the referendum, which must be no later than Jan. 9, 2011, goes ahead.

"The situation is the more urgent because national unity is no longer attractive to southerners. … With the sides drifting apart … the role of outside actors is critical."

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