Our guest blogger is Peter Orr, the Senior Sudan Advocate for Refugees International.

In the last few weeks, the media has ramped up its coverage of violence in the South Sudanese state of Jonglei — and rightly so. Inter-ethnic clashes in Jonglei flared up in January, pitting the Lou Nuer and Murle ethnic groups against each other in what is the latest round of recurrent attacks between the two.

At the same time, however, violence on a much larger scale is hitting Sudan’s “new south”: Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile States. Fighting between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – North (SPLM-N) has forced tens of thousands of people to flee to Ethiopia and South Sudan. Nearly as many have been internally displaced and face dire food shortages.

Displacement is a growing problem in the region, and aid groups face immense challenges providing enough emergency food and care to support the displaced population. Bombing and fighting in the area have prevented local families from cultivating their crops, and a poor harvest in November left food stocks even lower than usual. The most insidious problem, however, is the aid blockade imposed by Khartoum.

The government’s refusal to allow international aid agencies (both UN and private) into its territory is putting tens of thousands of lives at risk. Only the Sudanese Red Crescent, seen as neither impartial nor capable of handling the needs of civilians in government and SPLM-N areas, has been allowed to enter the area.

The U.N. and countries including the United States have tried to shift Khartoum and stave off a humanitarian disaster. In recent weeks, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.N.’s top humanitarian official both visited Sudan and pressed Omar al-Bashir’s government for greater access. But neither visit was successful in opening Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile to desperately needed assistance.

Khartoum is clearly in bunker mode. Feeling that it was not sufficiently “rewarded” for allowing South Sudan to break away, it is now wary of any incentives the West might offer for opening up these war-torn states. It is also keen to avoid a second Darfur, where Khartoum saw humanitarian assistance as merely a friendly façade for Western meddling. More than that, Bashir’s regime sees the aid blockade in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile as another way to force the SPLM-N to surrender for the sake of suffering civilians.

Given the dire need in these two states and the lack of movement by Sudan, some in the U.S. are now calling for forced access to Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile – whereby food and medical supplies might be flown or trucked into the two areas against Khartoum’s will. Certainly, the need is clear; but leaving aside the prospect of Sudanese military retaliation, the practicalities of such a move are thorny indeed. Dropping aid from the air would be incredibly costly, and it’s unclear how the supplies would be distributed once the aid hits the ground. Meanwhile, the land routes from South Sudan into Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan are either impassible or go through Khartoum-held areas. Ethiopia, another possible entry point, would be wary of provoking Khartoum by cooperating with such a plan.

For the time being, Khartoum’s recklessness and intransigence is certain to push more families from Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile into South Sudan and Ethiopia – adding to the over 100,000 Sudanese refugees already there. Those who can’t flee will face even more danger and deprivation; many will surely die.

As humanitarians, we continue to hope that this time Khartoum will prove its critics wrong; that this time it will welcome assistance and not endanger thousands of lives out of pique. But after years of disappointment, it is hard to expect anything better from Sudan. And the fear is that the most the world can do is prepare for the human tragedy that is about to unfold.

Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the writer-editor for the blog, Enough Said. She is reporting from Juba, South Sudan

“I’ve got 99 problems but Bashir ain’t one” is emblazoned on t-shirts for sale in the capital of the brand-new country of South Sudan, which officially gained its independence from the North on Saturday.

Even before Sudan gained independence from the United Kingdom and Egypt in 1956, civil war had broken out between the North and South, where rebels rose up to protest the region’s marginalization. Decades and 2 million deaths later, the South is now independent. The weekend was jubilant — from midnight on Friday when crowds filled the streets waving South Sudan flags, through the official declaration ceremony attended by dozens of heads of state and high-level delegations, to the Monday holiday.

“The independence we celebrate today transfers the responsibility for our destinies to our hands,” said newly sworn-in President Salva Kiir, addressing the tens of thousands of people who gathered for the independence ceremony on Saturday. “From today on we will have no excuses or scapegoats to blame.” The president thanked the international community for “addressing the gap” in providing basic services to Southern Sudanese and said that his administration would make public interest its “first, second, and final priorities.”

South Sudan may no longer have to deal with Omar al-Bashir as its leader, but there are many potentially explosive issues that the two countries must continue to work together to sort out, as well as internal issues ranging from the development basics — education, health, infrastructure — to the region’s propensity for conflict. The 99 problems is “just the condensed list,” as one journalist quipped.

Since 2009, a high-level panel convened by the African Union has been facilitating discussion between the North and South governments over big-ticket issues like how to share oil revenue, which is mostly found in the South but must be refined and transported for export through the North. Oil experts estimate that about half of the North’s revenue comes from oil, so finding a compromise is necessary for the viability of the North’s economy, thus regional stability as well. The new international border, 1,200 miles in length, must be demarcated and arrangements made for the communities on either side who are used to being able to travel freely in search of water and pasture. Citizenship more broadly must be settled to ensure that people who have long lived in the other part of what’s now two countries don’t become vulnerable – or at least not more so. Read more

Our guest blogger, Lauren Jenkins, works on post-conflict peacebuilding issues and writes about national security at her blog International Development Without Pity.

As July 9 and South Sudan’s independence from northern Sudan draws nearer, violent attacks by the North on the South and its border areas are increasing in frequency and intensity. In Abyei, a disputed border region, upwards of 113,000 people have fled clashes between the northern and southern armies.

Yesterday, President Obama met with Princeton Lyman, his Special Envoy to Sudan, and the readout from the White House was one of cautious condemnation:

The President expressed deep concern over the violence and the lack of humanitarian access, and he underscored the urgent need to get back to cooperative negotiations to enable full and timely implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

The President is “following the situation closely” while Ambassador Lyman works to achieve “a cessation of hostilities across the region and to support the emergence of two viable states at peace.”

Indeed, a peaceful conclusion to twenty years of civil war was the goal of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and should be still. That’s why suggestions by Representative Donald Payne (D-NJ) to arm South Sudan made at a subcommittee hearing on Thursday are so worrisome. Specifically, he referred to revisiting a 2008 decision by President Bush to provide air defense systems to South Sudan. That request was never fulfilled because, according to Bush administration officials, the Southern Sudanese army was not trained and equipped to use and maintain the systems.

Arming South Sudan with air defense systems would put them into deeper conflict with the North, not bring the two closer to peace. Further, South Sudan’s army still doesn’t have the requisite training to use and maintain an air defense system. That poses a distinct problem when it comes to distinguishing friendly aircraft from the North’s attack aircraft. In 2007, a UN panel of experts sent a report to the Security Council documenting the North’s use of attack aircraft painted to look like UN aircraft in bombing raids of Darfuri villages. Were the North to use this tactic in the South, it could put UN aircraft at risk.

If UN aircraft are at risk, more than just their aircrews’ lives hang in the balance. When the international community floated the idea of a No-Fly Zone over Darfur in 2007, Sudan expert Julie Flint noted humanitarian agencies were “quietly but unanimously appalled by the prospect” and even if northern Sudan didn’t forcibly ground humanitarian flights in retaliation, “the United Nations most likely would, for fear of sending its planes into a potential combat zone.”

An ill-trained South Sudanese army firing surface-to-air missiles at planes that look like UN aircraft could easily ground UN flights in South Sudan and the border regions. Without access to life-saving humanitarian assistance, the 113,000 people already displaced in Abyei would suffer. Air defense systems might curtail northern Sudan’s onslaught of aerial bombardments, but they would not stop its ground forces or artillery batteries from launching equally deadly attacks against the South. In the end, arming South Sudan could endanger already vulnerable civilians, not protecting them.

Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the writer/editor of the Enough Project’s blog, reporting from Abyei in Sudan.

Achol’s face and neck were dotted with white burns from the sparks of a cluster bomb. Her daughter, one-year-old Nyibach, suffered from the same painful sores. Achol’s family, which includes four other children who went missing in the chaos of the recent attack, is from Abyei, the hotly contested region on Sudan’s North-South border.

Deploying Antonov planes and fighter jets, ground troops, tanks, and government-aligned militias, the Sudanese government’s military offensive late last month in Abyei displaced upwards of 100,000 people. Abyei’s leaders, themselves displaced along with the majority of the area’s Ngok Dinka residents, estimated that 116 civilians were killed, but the death toll is difficult to determine because the government has restricted access.

But casualties like Achol and Nyibach aren’t simply “collateral damage” of a confrontation between the northern and southern armies. According to an internal U.N. memo, the ethnic make-up of the displaced, and accounts by those who fled, indicate a campaign by the Sudanese government to deliberately target civilians, with the aim of depopulating the Abyei area of residents that identify as southerners.

No sooner had the situation in Abyei tenuously stabilized -– with the northern and southern armies facing each other on either side of the river and tens of thousands of displaced southerners receiving aid – when fighting broke out just north of Abyei in Southern Kordofan, the North’s only oil-producing state. The military confrontation reportedly arose from a disarmament campaign gone afoul. But violence has now engulfed most of the state, prompting President Obama to issue an audio statement calling for an immediate ceasefire.

With South Sudan’s independence from the North just weeks away, the northern government led by President Omar al-Bashir, notorious for its targeting of civilians based on ethnicity and use of local militias to flame local tensions, seems set on destabilizing the border area in a last-ditch effort to back the southern government into a wall. Diplomats have been clear that the recent violence won’t derail the South’s secession, but much is still at stake in negotiations between the two sides over arrangements on combustible issues such as oil, citizenship, debt, and boundaries, including the status of Abyei.

Reports mount daily of atrocities carried out against civilians from the Nuba Mountains, northerners who sided with the South during the civil war. In addition to aerial bombardments -– often with rudimentary explosives made of oil drums pushed out the back of Antonovs –- government-aligned militias are reportedly going door-to-door abducting or executing people sympathetic to the South’s ruling party. In one particularly harrowing account, a U.N. security report described smuggling out Sudanese staff in commercial vehicles because the northern army wasn’t allowing them to be evacuated.

Analysts, including those at Enough, have long warned that Abyei and the tensions in Sudan’s border states could reignite war between the North and South. But until recently, it looked as though the rival governments had concluded that a return to war was not in their interest. Now, the ferocity of the violence and the targeting of civilians in Abyei and Southern Kordofan force a re-evaluation of that assumption.

As the purely rhetorical international response to Abyei proved, public shaming of Bashir’s government accomplishes nothing. But contrary to the belief voiced quietly in diplomatic circles that the Obama administration has used up what influence it had in Sudan, there is more the United States could do to demonstrate to Bashir’s government that there are consequences for targeting its own civilians.

A statement by the Enough Project and partners issued today outlines some of the specific actions the U.S. should take to pressure the Sudanese government to step back from a full-out war.

Our Guest Blogger is Laura Heaton, Writer/Editor for the blog, Enough Said.

Just a few days ago, support appeared to be waning for imposing a no-fly zone over Libya. But last night, the U.N. Security Council authorized military intervention in Libya, passing a Chapter VII resolution that gives the United Nations permission to use “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post for the Enough Project comparing the international response to Libya and to Darfur – a topic that has stirred up strong frustration among some in the Sudan advocacy community.

Drawing comparisons across foreign policy issues has limited use, of course, because there is so much variation from one situation to the next and thus, they illicit different responses. But in recent years, as a growing consensus has formed around the idea that the international community does indeed have a “responsibility to protect,” an important question has remained: Can we actually get our acts together and effectively protect civilians?

The question is by no means answered yet. Despite the quick vocal response of the U.N. Security Council – less than a week – in the wake of Qaddafi’s deployment of fighter jets against regime opponents, the U.N.’s February resolution (including an ICC referral) and the strong condemnation by many governments has had little measurable impact on saving civilians in Libya. But yesterday’s actions are an encouraging sign that if there’s a common and genuine international will to respond, it’s possible to take collective steps to prevent further bloodshed.

In my post earlier this week, I noted that the U.N.’s hesitation to act decisively in response to the growing crisis unfolding in Darfur gave the Sudanese government time to wage their campaign against civilians.

By contrast, the urgency with which the international community reacted and began drawing up plans for how it might get involved in Libya sets an important new precedent for preventing atrocities and protecting civilians – one that should guide future responses, I argued.

The New York Times noted this significance reporting on last night’s vote:

Diplomats said the specter of former conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, when a divided and sluggish Security Council was seen to have cost lives, had given a sense of moral urgency to Thursday’s debate. Yet some critics also noted that a no-fly zone authorized in the early 1990s in Bosnia had failed to prevent some of the worst massacres there, including the Srebrenica massacre.

A mentor of mine with ample foreign policy experience was also cautious about the suggestion of a trend toward a more proactive international response to civilians at risk. “The Pentagon still hates the idea, and I am still unconvinced that the international community has the will and resources to see any kind of military intervention and post conflict effort successfully through,” he wrote in an email. The fact that Libya erupted after a string of uprisings across the Middle East is also an important piece of context that made this situation unique. The international community had a bit of lead-time while watching events unfold in Egypt, Tunisian, and Bahrain.

In the last 24 hours, the U.N.’s actions appear to have had their desired effect. Faced with promised U.N. strikes against his military, Qaddafi today announced of a ceasefire. We’ll see what happens next.