J Carrier for The New York Times A camp for members of the Dinka tribe outside the town of Abyei, Sudan.

When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane. Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter “uncle”; others call him “commander.” On this day, angry and anxious, the people of Abyei wanted Winter’s help in averting a return to civil war between the predominantly Arab north and the black south — a decades-long conflict, claiming more than two million dead, that Winter helped to end with his work on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005.

J Carrier for The New York Times Winter meets a Darfur rebel, Minni Minawi, in Juba, Sudan.

Winter blinked in the flat light. It was 9 a.m., and the Caravan’s fuselage cast the only shadow. Abyei is 600 miles north of the equator, and this was the height of the dry season. The sun sucked the color from everything; alongside the airstrip a herd of gaunt cows licked at the last remnants of mud. The cows would head back north when the rains returned. The people who tend them, the Arab tribe called Misseriya, would then be gone for the season, and northern forces, guided by the national government in Khartoum, would feel free to swoop down and force the Ngok Dinka farmers farther south. Burning villages, killing young men, raping and abducting women and children: this creates ethnic facts on the ground to justify pushing the border south and increasing the north’s control of a territory rich in oil. From Easter until May was not much time to forestall the attack, and Winter knew it.

For the past quarter century — as head of a nongovernmental organization called the U.S. Committee for Refugees, as an official at the federal Agency for International Development and, most recently, as a special representative to the State Department for Sudan, a post created for him — Winter has fought in the back rooms of Washington and in the African bush to bring peace to Sudan. It’s not evenhandedness that makes him effective; it’s his total commitment to the people of south Sudan and a conviction, which has only grown with the years, that the government in Khartoum is, in essence, a brutal cabal. After two decades of fighting for their rights at negotiating tables, he has gained the southerners’ complete trust. “He’s simple and clear,” Edward Lino, the southern government’s chairman in Abyei, told me. “He doesn’t mince words. He’s a great man” who also “has great, great push.”

His stamina is also legendary. Once, during an all-night meeting on the 2005 agreement, a snake bit Winter as he raced through tall grass to present an amended paragraph for the south’s approval. Intent on striking a deal, he thought he had run into a rock until a colleague pointed out fang marks in his leg the next day. Senator Jack Danforth, the Bush administration’s special envoy to Sudan from 2001 to 2004, calls him “a saint,” an “excellent, excellent human being,” whose “soulfulness” inspires trust in those he serves. According to Danforth, Winter’s intense attachment to the southern side was an asset in the context of a larger diplomatic offensive. “The same person,” Danforth notes, “doesn’t have to talk to everybody.” Winter’s bond with the south is such that, since retiring in August 2006, he has worked pro bono as an adviser to the government of southern Sudan, a government he helped to build following the 2005 agreement.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement — which ended the north-south war but did nothing to stop the conflict to the west in Darfur — was among the Bush administration’s few major foreign-policy successes. Now it’s coming undone, and the collapse is beginning in Abyei, a hot little village built up into a town by oil companies. The population grew to 30,000 from 5,000 as its residents returned after two decades of war. Around a buzzing market of tin-roofed lean-tos and U.N. food warehouses, people were building huts and hanging up tarps. But on the main road, the armies of north and south were mobilizing T-72 tanks and amassing more soldiers.

Abyei is at the southern edge of arid land and the beginning of sub-Saharan jungle — even the soil changes from barren sand to rich laterite loam. From the north comes the influence of the Arab world; the south, partly because of the war, has far stronger ties to the West and Christianity. Here, two worlds collide and two governments compete for territory inch by inch; under that ground lies as much as half of Sudan’s estimated five billion barrels of oil. In many ways, Abyei is a microcosm for the entire country. As Winter put it, “The future of Abyei is the future of all Sudan.”

Winter wore black Rockports and brown socks. He carried a nylon briefcase in one hand and a blue plastic shopping bag in the other. Inside it were bug spray, a shaving kit, a change of clothes and “An Army at Dawn,” a history of World War II in Africa. As an architect of the failing peace, Winter came to see what might be done to avert the potential slaughter.

As activists and journalists in recent years focused attention on Darfur, Winter argued, they and the Bush administration have neglected the push for comprehensive peace in the rest of the country. Although both north and south signed the peace accord more than three years ago, little has changed. Without international pressure sufficient to slow the process, both sides were starting to play a very dangerous game of chicken in Abyei.

J Carrier for The New York Times The town of Abyei before it was virtually destroyed by northern military forces in May.

“I hope you’ve done some homework in the United States,” Chol Changoth, a member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (S.P.L.M.), which dominates Sudan’s south, said as someone handed Winter a sweating bottle of orange Fanta. “Are the people of the United States taking Abyei into consideration?” He scanned Winter’s face for any flicker of hope.

Although, technically, north and south share a unified government, the National Congress Party of the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement of the south are mostly at odds. Between them, politics become a zero-sum game. The 2005 peace agreement calls for a nationwide census, which, despite flaws, has finally started. The accord also calls for a 2009 national election, which Winter and others say Khartoum may try to delay. Above all, peace means that in 2011, the south is counting on a referendum on whether or not to stay with the north.

The question of Abyei was so contested during negotiations for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that it got its own protocol, one that the United States — with Winter on the negotiating team — agreed to in order to save the peace process as a whole. The U.S. drafted the protocol, pushed both sides to sign it and, according to Winter, then walked away. “We did a good thing and a bad thing,” as he explained to the crowd at the airport. “The good thing is the Abyei Protocol. The bad thing is we went home.” Now Winter is watching his old adversary, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, play familiar tricks. “Bashir knows he’s looked the whole international community right in the eyes,” Winter said. “He says yes, yes, yes to the protocol, and then he says no. . . . And what happened? Nothing. So he’s learned a lesson, and you can see the lesson even in Darfur because the United Nations says a hybrid force should come and he says no, and what happens? Nothing. So it’s very, very, very dangerous, this pattern.”

At its core, the fight over Abyei raises the question of whether Sudan will remain a single country and how a fissure might be averted. As Alex de Waal, a longtime observer of Sudanese politics, told me, “Abyei is the cockpit of Sudan where the two parties are testing each other’s readiness to go to war again.”

ON THE SURFACE, two different people, the ethnic Ngok Dinka linked to the south and the Arab Misseriya of the north, vie over who has rights to the land. With the added pressure of desertification, the Arab nomads need the greener pastures of Abyei more than ever to graze and water their cattle. They are also being pushed south by the pressures of commercial farming. “In this belt north of the 10th parallel, land that used to be common access has been leased out to mechanized farming schemes,” Douglas H. Johnson, a member of the Abyei Boundaries Commission, said. To settle the problem, after the 2005 agreement Johnson and an international team drew a shared border along the 10th parallel, but the north rejected their solution and, on the ground, there was only mounting tension. With so much to lose, the Misseriya and Dinka were growing more anxious as May loomed ahead.

And in this standoff President Bashir has done what he always does: endorsed Arab militias who carry out Darfur-style scorched-earth tactics. In the late 1980s, when Bashir was the general in charge of Abyei, the militias chased the Dinka off their land. Just last year, Bashir called on the militias “to open their camps and gather the mujahedeen.” Salva Kiir, the president of south Sudan, said, “The guns the Misseriya are using are military weapons.” According to Kiir, who is also first vice president in the somewhat notional united Sudanese government, the militias are supported by Khartoum.

The similarities between Darfur’s attacks and those around Abyei are no coincidence. They betray war’s grander pattern in Sudan, the largest country in Africa. As Winter says: “You have to connect the dots. You connect the dots, you see a pattern. A pattern means intent.” All of Sudan’s wars involve the handiwork of a small group in the center waging campaigns against those who live at the periphery. To hold onto power and resources, the center fights its own edge. Marginalization, Winter said, meant perpetual warfare. “Unless you really have engaged in Sudan, you don’t get to that point of thinking,” he said.

Winter got to that point of thinking some time ago. His colleague Susan Rice, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Bill Clinton, watched Winter’s views evolve. “I’ve seen him be an advocate when I was a policy maker, and when I was on the outside, he was somebody on the inside we could trust to do the right thing,” she told me. “Roger has been a consistent, passionate, principled advocate at a time when we had reason to doubt that the Bush administration was really engaged in these issues.” On Sudan, she added, “people of all political, religious and racial stripes view Roger as the compass’s true north.” In this case, true south is more apt. For Winter’s part, he has watched many an American offer “carrots,” as he says, to Khartoum. That practice “can be deadly,” he told me. “You go to Khartoum, they treat you very nicely, they’re very presentable, they’re indefatigably hospitable, but their approach to governance is murderous,” he said.

It’s this murderous governance that Winter is determined to end. “I’m not opposed to engagement,” he said. “The problem is the way we’re doing this and the atmosphere which surrounds it.” In Sudan, he argues, “there’s a good guy and a bad guy.” As he sees it, he sides with the good guys. He doesn’t hang out in the middle. “I guess there’s a role for that,” he said. “It’s just not mine.”

Taking sides can be dangerous, Andrew Natsios, who served as U.S. special envoy to Sudan from 2006 to 2007, argues. “We don’t need rallying cries,” he said. “A big advocacy campaign right now could be really destructive to the possibility of peace.”

Winter argues that the Bush administration’s pressure for comprehensive peace in Sudan is flagging, in part because America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have hamstrung its ability to call Khartoum on its myriad abuses against its own people. The U.S. government also seems to be moving toward strengthening relations with Khartoum, which Winter vehemently opposes. But Natsios believes that right now, with the likelihood of a tougher American administration taking over in January, there’s a critical window to engage Khartoum. “The north badly wants to normalize relations with the U.S. during the Bush administration,” he said. Natsios envisions “a grand deal,” including an exchange of oil for land in which the north cedes Abyei to the south (as it already is supposed to do under the Abyei Protocol) in exchange for a percentage of southern oil revenue.

“Quite frankly, to make progress in Sudan, you have to engage all parties,” Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told me. “Our vision has been a unified government, which is something Roger himself worked for, so we can’t not engage the government.” Regime change has not been part of American policy in Sudan, and while the United States has kept Khartoum under sanctions, put pressure on it at the United Nations, acquiesced in the referral by the Security Council of Darfur prosecutions to the International Criminal Court (which the Bush administration otherwise opposes) and led several large-scale diplomatic initiatives to push for peace in the region — not least the initiatives in which Winter played a key role — Washington has nonetheless always accepted Khartoum as a partner of sorts. According to Frazer, the United States offered as recently as last December to mediate the north-south conflict over Abyei, but the southern government, led by the S.P.L.M., said it preferred to handle the negotiations with Khartoum itself. “You can’t really criticize us for dealing with President Bashir when the S.P.L.M. themselves are saying that’s their partner and that’s who they want to negotiate on Abyei,” Frazer told me.

Richard Williamson, the American negotiator appointed by President Bush, has come under fire for his talks with Bashir. “Our president’s commitment to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan is deep,” Williamson said. “His support for our efforts is unwavering. He looks at me, and I can’t come up with a key. Some of my critics have criticized me for engaging. But given the level of suffering, it’s worth engaging. It’s not enough to criticize. It may make you feel better, but people are still suffering.” Danforth told me: “Roger is more principled than I am. He definitely sees engagement as more of a moral issue.” But there’s a practical aspect, too, to negotiation. After all, Danforth points out, the north did sign a peace agreement. “It has lasted nearly four years,” he said. “A lot of lives, I think, have been saved.”

WINTER DUCKED INTO a thatched hut in the front-line village of Todaj, a few miles north of Abyei. On the roof were a wooden cross and book-size solar panels, which were charging a satellite phone. Inside, the air was close. Several days earlier, this entire village — 150 Dinka families — fled south to the safety of Abyei on foot. Now only a handful of elders and a chief, Nyol Paduot, his salt-and-pepper hair and beard unkempt, his eyes baggy with lack of sleep, had returned to safeguard their land.

Having been run off the land three times — in 1991, 1997 and 2000 — the elders knew the lethal pattern by heart. “We know that when they burn our village, they want the land,” Paduot said. “That’s why we come back.”

The elders of Todaj refused to be pushed farther south by Arab militias camping nearby or by the government (northern) soldiers who built barracks at the village’s edge. Under the peace deal, the soldiers of Sudan’s 31st Brigade stationed here were supposed to withdraw from Todaj, but they have not. As Winter drove past the barracks in a silver S.U.V., one shirtless soldier doing laundry stood up and took a long look. The S.U.V. belonged to their rival, the S.P.L.M., for whom Winter was working. Winter passed what looked like a huge white circus tent, which was labeled I.O.M. in U.N. blue, for International Organization for Migration: a way station for displaced people. It stood dusty and empty. The U.N. had judged it too risky to stay in Todaj.

“It’s a long war,” the chief told Winter. “Peace came, and no one helped us implement it, and it’s become a problem.” He went on: “I have a question for you who’ve come from America. In Abyei, we don’t know if it’s war or peace. When will the intervention come? When the fighting has started again?” The hut grew quiet. A fly buzzed; a pair of baby goats bleated in the corner. Cooking pots clanged next door. “All that’s happening in Darfur,” the chief said, “happened here in Abyei.”

The main differences between Darfur and Abyei were religion and oil. Khartoum’s troops hit Todaj because they claimed many people there had left Islam, becoming apostate. They justified their actions as jihad against infidels. But in Darfur, government troops attacked fellow Muslims. “That surprised us,” the chief said. Besides religion and oil — which Darfur does not have — there was nothing to separate Abyei from Darfur. “Todaj is very strategic for the 31st Brigade to coordinate all their activities for the oil fields,” Paduot added. “They bring their supplies from the oil fields here, and this is where they come to distribute ammunitions.”

He ran his finger north along the white space of a tattered map. According to the boundaries commission’s recommendation, this land — up to the line of latitude at 10 degrees 10 minutes — belonged to the Dinka, although the Misseriya were free to use it for grazing. The global-positioning-system reading off the satellite phone put Todaj, the last and northernmost Dinka settlement, at 9 degrees 43 minutes, more than 30 miles south inside where the Dinka had the right to be. “This is our land,” the chief said. His own village lay in Block Four of an oil concession operated by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (G.N.P.O.C.) — pronounced gin-pock. The oil was right under us, Paduot said, but no Dinka he knew — or Misseriya for that matter — worked in the oil fields.

Suddenly, a group of men in ragtag fatigues arrived outside the mud hut. They sat with their backs against the wall, where they could hear everything going on inside. Sure enough, it was the government forces, and it was time to go. Winter clasped the chief’s hand, and then quickly took his leave.

Not all of the Dinka were as lucky as those of Todaj. Days earlier, many who had been working as goatherds at Misseriya cattle camps were forced to leave everything behind for good and flee south to the relative safety of Abyei. Because the large white tents near Todaj were too risky to use, about 400 survivors were camped in Abyei, using water from a nearby swamp.

“We refused to leave without our goats,” Ayii Dut Dut, one of the displaced goatherds, told me. Among the herders in the camp, about half a dozen were abducted years earlier, then taken north to work for the Misseriya. But most were there voluntarily as shepherds and sharecroppers after the 1988 famine sent them searching for work. In recent skirmishes between the Arab militias and the southern forces, many Arabs were killed. As a result, when the militias returned to their cattle camps after fighting, they wanted their Dinka workers to leave — immediately. But the Dinka said they wouldn’t go without the goats, which represented all their wealth in the world.

So that night, riding camels and horses, Arabs attacked their camp. Most escaped, but not all. After hiding in the nearby bush, Dut said he returned to the deserted camp at dawn to find three children — ages 5, 5 and 3 — who had been shot. He buried them and left without his goats, he said as he squatted in the shade of a single acacia tree near 200 other displaced people.

If Darfur is a land grab, then Abyei is an oil grab. Last year, an estimated $529 million of oil revenue came from the region, according to the International Crisis Group, an independent, nonprofit political-analysis group. Khartoum has used the south’s oil to build the north’s infrastructure. A combination of war, sanctions and public outcry forced Western companies to abandon Sudan’s oil over the past decade, and China, among others, stepped in.

Without knowing what to look for, the signs of oil excavation around Abyei aren’t so easy to see. You can drive for hours and see nothing but fishermen searching in ponds for Nile perch and mudfish. The roadside is lined with long brown braids of dried fish for sale. “They are some of the poorest people in the world,” Edward Lino, the southern government’s chairman for Abyei, told me as we drove through the wasteland. “They have this rich land that’s being robbed from them, and they don’t know what to do.”

Suddenly, a series of white pipes with red knobs appeared in a clearing along the telltale hummock covering the pipeline itself, which was built in 2003. Beginning in the 1980s, many of the fishermen were forced to resettle in much the same way the people returning to Todaj were being threatened this year. To survive, they depended on a battery of international aid agencies as oil was pumped out from beneath them.

One afternoon, I visited a field office of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. The company is a consortium in which 40 percent of the investment is Chinese, 30 percent Malaysian, 25 percent Indian and 5 percent Sudanese. International workers in red, green and beige jumpsuits scurried through the waiting room, where a sign read, “Use the waiting time to ask for forgiveness.” Outdoors, Chinese workers in red jumpsuits worked alongside Sudanese. The Great Wall Drilling Company was “rigging up”: preparing to drill in the next few days, a supervisor, Mohamed Idris, said. He sat behind a door that read “Company Man,” while soap operas flickered on flat-screen televisions in the air-conditioned dark. The fishermen living outside the facility have no electricity at all.

THE RELATIONSHIP between the Ngok Dinka and the Arab Misseriya is more complex than it looks at first glance. They share a way of life in what John Ryle of the Rift Valley Institute calls “an intimate enmity.”

One evening, Winter attended a feast in his honor at the home of the paramount Dinka chief, Kuol Deng Kuol, a towering, soft-spoken man. The large mud greeting room, hung with red-flowered bedsheets, was full of Dinka and Misseriya elders. Winter was eating wild honey and bread when two anxious Misseriya leaders, wearing white turbans, approached him. Each was the head of at least 2,000 Misseriya — they were the “cornerstone” of the Arabs in Abyei — and none of them wanted war. Conflict would mean their cows could no longer come south into Dinka land, and they would die. Already under pressure from farming and other nomads to the north, they couldn’t risk being squeezed out of the south too. “About this peace, we don’t want to lose it,” Deng Bilial Bachar, a blustery leader, told Winter. “We’re holding it very tightly and very hard.”

Recently, the two elders told Winter, government-backed militias had gathered at the edge of town. They were going to attack Abyei. “Three days I was talking night and day to make people go back,” Bachar said. Both the Misseriya Arabs and the Dinka were simply pawns in a larger battle playing out between north and south over politics and oil, he said. If north or south wanted to return to war, let them do it somewhere else. “We don’t want war, 100 percent,” he said. “You have to convey this message clearly.”

Next to Bachar, with clear blue eyes and a deeply creased face, was Shogar Muhammad Mahmud, who had come from his cattle camp next to the village of Todaj. “The water on that side,” he said, indicating the north where he’d come from, “has become so few — little — like drought. Just allow our cattle to graze and get water because there’s no water in our side. Just allow us to come through.” The Abyei Protocol safeguarded Misseriya migration routes, but Mahmud didn’t know this. Critics like Winter argue that Khartoum manipulates the Misseriya by not explaining that peace protects their rights. “It is too easy for those who wish to undermine the C.P.A. to exploit the fear on the part of the Misseriya that ceding Abyei to the south would cut them off from access to dry-season grazing,” Ryle told me, referring to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. “And the fear of Ngok Dinka in the S.P.L.M. that they might once more be cheated of the chance for self-determination means that they also are in no mood to compromise.”

The north argues that Abyei isn’t simply a matter of maps. Culturally, Abyei has always been part of the Arab north, they say. “Even during World War II, Abyei was supporting the Middle East by sending cows,” the chairman of the National Congress Party in Abyei, Zachariah Atem Payin, said. As a Dinka man who supports Khartoum, Payin exemplifies the complexities of identity in Abyei. He was also among Winter’s many detractors. “I’ve heard he’s very difficult, very hard,” Payin said. “He’s the one who caused all this confusion in Sudan.” By confusion, he meant war. “It’s because of Roger Winter supporting the S.P.L.M. that they won’t listen.”

WINTER GAZED AT the sun-bleached photo and the artificial flowers that marked the grave of his friend, Dr. John Garang, in the southern capital, Juba. The leader of the south’s liberation movement, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash three years ago. Many, including Winter, saw his death as an enormous setback to durable peace. Winter and Garang were extremely close. “He loved to tell jokes, he loved to tell stories,” Winter said. Tears gathered on his white eyelashes. “He never lost his focus and basically his focus was a new Sudan, a totally new country, whether it was in one piece or two.”

Later, Winter sat by the Nile drinking a Bell, a Ugandan beer. The moon was heavy and full, bright enough to see the river eddy as it passed. He spied a baby crocodile splash off the bank. “Look!” he said gleefully, seeming much more like a boy adventurer than an elder statesman.

Winter’s new role as an adviser to the southern government set off a political storm in Khartoum. In a cable, the U.S. Embassy took note of what one northern paper said: “Winter’s appointment ‘shows that the S.P.L.M. is a farce . . . a movement that suckles the breasts of the U.S.’ ” Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the State Department, insisted that Winter’s advocacy for the south shouldn’t bother people (“It doesn’t me,” she said) because he no longer has any official American role.

His activism began when he was in his 20s in Hartford, where he worked for the Salvation Army. He went on to resettle refugees arriving in America from the world’s worst conflict zones, beginning with Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. But it was his experience working with Tutsis displaced from Rwanda — before the genocide began — that made him move on to the conflict zones themselves. Soon he was riding on the front lines in Rwanda in 1994 with the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame. During the genocide, he flew home every few weeks to brief the U.S. government on what he witnessed firsthand. President Clinton’s later statements that he had not been fully aware of what was happening caused Winter, he says, to leave the Democratic Party.

Winter told the people in Abyei: “Honestly, the people that have your interests at heart are you, really only you. The Americans can be O.K. now, but next year they may be not so O.K. But it’s your place, it’s your life, it’s your future.” Now that he’s out of the American government, Winter makes no bones about what he is: an advocate. His job is to shout himself hoarse until someone listens to what he’s saying about the worsening crisis in Abyei and the failure to do enough about it. “That’s what an advocate does,” he said. “No matter how good the government does, you’re always goosing them to do better. Otherwise, why does anybody need you?”

Sometimes neutrality is just not the right answer, and on Sudan, he thinks neutrality is practically and morally bankrupt. “I’m an evangelist,” he said, only half joking. “I preach the gospel of Sudan.”

ABYEI BURNED TO the ground when the rains began in May. As Winter predicted, once the Misseriya cattle were safely out of the south, the north attacked the town. The violence began with the kind of small skirmish that had been occurring for months: policemen from the south and soldiers from the north got into a fight a few miles from Todaj. There was a shootout, and when a northern soldier died in the hospital, his colleagues shot up the ward. Within hours, the 31st Brigade was firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades into the heart of Abyei. The United Nations evacuated most of its nonessential staff by helicopter. Tens of thousands of Dinka fled south. The Arabs took over the town. The ethnic facts that favored Khartoum now existed on the ground. “Mainly women and children are uprooted again from their houses and are now in open areas under heavy rains with no shelter, food and water,” the south’s president, Salva Kiir, said in a speech late last month. “This human tragedy is caused unfortunately by Sudan Armed Forces Brigade 31 that is illegally present in Abyei town and against the provisions of the C.P.A.”

As usual, Winter was close by. He flew in the next day from Juba. He organized the first convoy into town after the attack. “Some of the buildings and vehicles are still smoking,” he told me by satellite phone. Then he was caught in a sandstorm. “I can’t see squat and I can’t open my eyes,” he said, as he spat sand through his teeth. “The U.N. is buttoned up behind barricades again,” he added. “There are almost no people.” Later, Winter sent me photographs: the market’s stalls were incinerated. Lines of white ash marked where the walls had been. Hospitals and schools were shelled. The U.N. warehouses were destroyed. Terrified people were still streaming south. The U.N. first estimated that 50,000 people were displaced, but Winter, in the road among them, thought the number looked much higher.

“This didn’t have to happen,” Winter shouted over the wind.

Kuol Deng Kuol, the gentle Dinka chief who had held the feast in Winter’s honor six weeks earlier, was now destitute and staying in huts with dozens of family members. “My people are living under trees,” he said by phone from a camp south of town. The American negotiator, Richard Williamson, flew to the town. “I’ve been to Bosnia and Kosovo and I’ve never seen anything like Abyei,” he told me. “At least 95 percent of the homes were destroyed” — even those 25 feet from the United Nations base. When U.S.-led talks between north and south over Abyei turned to bickering, Williamson walked out. “I’m not going to give any legitimacy of U.S. participation to name-calling,” he said. The next day, amid reports of troops massing at Abyei, the United Nations Security Council met with both sides, who agreed to international arbitration, as they have many, many times before. “We need terms of arbitration — specifics,” Williamson said. “If 50,000 people who’ve had their lives shattered isn’t enough for you to take responsibility for your own solution, then the U.S. cannot impose one.” Disgusted, he told both sides, “If you think I’m a junkyard dog, wait until January.”

Eliza Griswold is a New America Foundation fellow. Her book, “The 10th Parallel: Where Christianity and Islam Collide in Africa and Asia,”
is due out next year.