JUBA, SUDAN // While the south accounts for as much as 80 per cent of Sudan's oil production, more than control of this wealth is at stake when voters begin deciding on Sunday whether to separate from the north and form the world's newest country.
Tens of thousands of northern Sudanese living and working in the south face an uncertain future too.
Here, in the city that would be the capital of the new nation, northern traders operate stalls in the bustling markets, hawking electronics, cheap clothing and household appliances imported from Dubai and elsewhere in the Arab world. Most of these successful traders migrated south after the 22-year north-south war, in which about two million people died, ended in 2005.
Sudan's 2008 census put the population of the predominantly Christian and animist south at 8.26 million, about 80,000 of whom are from the mainly Muslim north. Traders and non-traders alike are weighing whether to return north before the south's independence referendum, out of fear of reprisals that some predict will occur regardless of the outcome.
"Northerners are expecting fighting and that is why they are leaving," said Gatluak Deng, a former governor of Upper Nile state who runs a bakery in Malakal, a large town on the Nile not far from the north-south border. "I believe the Sudan Armed Forces [the northern Sudanese army] are also preparing for war, so maybe these northerners are being told by their brothers in the north that they should come back."
In a country as turbulent as Sudan, such alarms are not unfamiliar.
During the presidential and parliamentary elections last April, the first since 1986, northern traders and shopkeepers in the Hai Malakal district of Juba closed their shops in the tense counting period that followed five days of polling. They worried that any north-south tensions in the aftermath could play out locally, with wealthy and prominent northerners in Juba becoming the targets of angry southern voters.
That did not occur. But the stakes are much higher in Sunday's vote, which many expect to lead to the break-up of what is geographically the largest country in Africa, with economic and political consequences for the continent.
The failure of the political leaders in Khartoum and Juba to reach an initial agreement on an outline of relations between north and south after the referendum has compounded tensions and fuelled economic and political uncertainty. Sudan is sub-Saharan Africa's third-largest oil producer, and the south earned about US$4.4 billion (Dh16.1bn) in oil revenues last year. Yet Juba's teeming markets illustrate why, even aside from the issue of how to apportion oil wealth after the referendum, no neat split between north and south is possible.
Along with staples such as bottled water, El Asar Supermarket in Hai Malakal stocks what are regarded here as luxury items - Nutella, feta cheese, basmati rice. The market caters to wealthy Sudanese as well as the large expatriate community, and it is run by a northern Sudanese family who set up business here in 2003. The owner said "people were very few" in Juba when he opened his market. He and other businessmen from the north have thrived since the peace deal in 2005 that ended the war and gave the south the right to hold an independence referendum. When asked about his plans after next week's vote, he said he was simply a businessman. Although his family lives in the capital, Khartoum, he has no desire to move to the north, even if the south becomes independent. "It is here in the south that my business is good. I don't worry about politics, but if politics says northerners must leave the south, I will be forced to go."
For the moment, in Konyo market and in the well-stocked shops of Hai Malakal, northern Sudanese traders run the show. Yet if this market is cut off or northern traders disappear after the vote, the consequences will be felt immediately.
Officials in Juba, once a garrison town for the government army from Khartoum, hope that any loss of trade with the north can be offset by expanding trade with its East African neighbours, Kenya and Uganda. The foreign-aid arm of the US government, the US Agency for International Development, has financed a $200 million project to pave 190km of road between Juba and the Ugandan border, but it will not be finished before the possible independence of the south in July.
Meanwhile, human rights organisations and UN officials have sounded warnings about the predicament of minorities in both north and south. The UN humanitarian agencies are planning for the possibility that 2.8 million people will be displaced in Sudan if fighting breaks out over the referendum.
Human Rights Watch reported in September that "both southerners in the north and northerners living in southern Sudan" said they "feared retaliation, even expulsion" if the vote is for independence.
"The fate of southern Sudanese who live in the north and northern Sudanese who live in the south is still uncertain," Valerie Amos, the UN's top humanitarian official, said during her recent visit to Sudan.
A northern Sudanese man who owns an electronics store that stocks computer parts and printers shipped from Dubai laughed when asked what he thought he could do to protect his stocks during the uncertain days ahead. "In fact, nothing," he said, shaking his head.
