Consider these numbers: In the course of one month, 112,800 people fled fighting in Abyei. In the course of less than two weeks 73,000 people were displaced by a particularly agressive campaign against civilians in South Kordofan.
The good news is that there seems to be a lull in the fighting. The bad news is that this lull is because Northern Sudanese military forces have largely succeeded in their strategy of displacing allies of the soon-to-be independent south. Last week, the Security Council approved a new peacekeeping force for Abyei to — hopefully–set the conditions by which civilians may return. And on the Kordofan front, parties came to an agreement in which militias traditionally allied with the south would disarm or become integrated into the Sudanese armed forces.
But, as I have written before, the Sudanese government’s strategy of forced displacement seems to have worked. The demographics of the areas in question have been altered before the Sudan’s split 11 days from now.