While Darfur might now be Sudan's most high-profile war, a violent conflict is brewing in the south that threatens to engulf more people over a wider area than the fighting in the country's west, according to commentators on the region.

Recent clashes over the oil-rich border area between northern and southern Sudan look set to escalate and could destroy the three-year old peace agreement that ended 20 years of conflict and caused 2 million deaths, media reports say.

According to Nicholas Kristof, writing in the International Herald Tribune, southern Sudan "is the tinderbox for Africa's next war, which will probably resemble Darfur but be carried out on a much wider scale".

Clashes between South Sudan's armed forces and a tribe of Arab nomads, the Misseriya - which is believed to be armed and backed by the Sudanese government in Khartoum - are the result of a failure to reach a political agreement about the oil-rich Abyei region.

The rhetoric on both sides is worrying. "War is going to take place," Joseph Dut Paguot, the acting government administrator in the Abyei region, said to the paper.

Chol Changath Chol, a representative of South Sudan in Abyei, agreed: "If there are no changes, war will come. It will break out here and spread everywhere."

The exact death toll from recent clashes is disputed but experts say it could be as high as several hundred since late November.

Oil is the chief reason for renewed violence along the border, according to the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor.

"I'm hopeful, because I know the relations between the two tribes," Abdul Rasool Al-Nour, a Messeriya Arab elder who helped to negotiate previous peace agreements between Abyei's Dinka African and Messeriya Arab tribes, told the Monitor. "I know how much each tribe needs each other. But we have the curse of the oil."

Political wrangling over oil is exactly what is stoking ethnic tensions in the region, according to the paper. As hostilities increase between the northern Sudanese government and the southern Sudanese People's Liberation Army, relations between Dinka and Messeriya tribes risk deteriorating.

"This was a good agreement, but the political reality is that the north regards Abyei as a Kuwait, and the south regards it as a Jerusalem, so we have a problem," a senior Western diplomat says to the Monitor. "So we should go back to arbitration. But right now, there is no progress on Abyei."

Writing in The New York Times, Kristof says "it looks increasingly likely that Darfur will become simply the prologue to a far bloodier conflict that engulfs all Sudan".

Not only have violent clashes resumed in border areas, but the terms of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between northern and southern Sudan look to be on increasingly uncertain ground, he writes.

The Sudanese government hasn't yet withdrawn all of its troops from the south; it hasn't accepted a boundary commission report for the border area of Abyei; it keeps delaying a census needed for national elections; and it seems to be depriving the south of oil revenues.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is highly unlikely to allow elections to take place as scheduled next year because he's increasingly unlikely to win, according to The New York Times article. Nor is he likely to allow a 2011 referendum to decide whether to separate South Sudan because southerners would likely vote for independence - depriving the government in the north of more than three-quarters of the country's oil.

Last time violence engulfed the region, government-sponsored Arab militias slaughtered civilians so as to terrorise local populations and drive them far away from oil wells, Kristof writes.

"We say to the international community, 'You midwifed the CPA, and then you left,' " Rebecca Garang, the widow of former southern leader John Garang, said to the paper. "You must come back and check the baby."

The future of peace in southern Sudan depends on commitment from the world community to the CAP process, Kristof writes in the International Herald Tribune.

"It is still possible to avert a new slaughter here, but only if there is a major international effort - involving the United Nations, Egypt, China and Europe as well as the United States - to ensure that the peace agreement is followed and that Bashir will pay a price for attacking the south."

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