KHARTOUM -- Cereal trader Said Abubaker has a simple explanation for the fast-rising price of the local staple sorghum in the town market at Warawar in southern Sudan: "Peace has been a stranger in our land for so long that now that it has come, nature does not know how to welcome it."
Unlike nature, the world now has the opportunity to wholeheartedly welcome peace in Sudan as Norway hosts an international donors' conference in Oslo on Monday and Tuesday. The conference will call for pledges of reconstruction assistance three months after a peace agreement for the south was signed.
To date, donors have been hardly more welcoming than nature. Yet peace is the good news story unfolding in the heart of Africa's largest country.