The United States is engaged in a major diplomatic effort to head off another conflict between the mainly Christian and animist south and the Muslim Arab-ruled north.

Regional stability is at grave risk if Sudan is indeed plunged back into conflict.

The country has been torn by turmoil since independence from Britain in 1956, when it plunged into civil war in which an estimated 5 million people died from the violence, famine or disease.

The critical element that will determine the fate of Africa's largest state is oil, a resource that is causing political and social upheaval across the continent as major strikes are being made from Angola to Uganda.

Some 80 percent of Sudan's oil reserves are in the south and the northern government in Khartoum doesn't want to relinquish the country's main economic asset. But the border between north and south has still not been clearly defined.

The U.S.-brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 called for boundary demarcation within six months. But five years later it remains unresolved and is a source of growing friction.

"A solution to the border is not only about drawing a line, but about defining the nature and management if that border and the future relations of communities on both sides," said the International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organization with headquarters in Brussels.

"Completing these tasks would go a long way toward preventing the border from becoming a source of renewed conflict in the post-CPA era," the group's Horn of Africa expert, Zach Vertin, observed in a Sept. 2 assessment.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared in Washington last Wednesday that the United States must find a way to convince Sudan's political leaders that it's "worth their while to peacefully accept an independent south and for the south to recognize that unless they want more years of warfare and no chance to build their own new state, they've got to make some accommodation with the north as well."

Southerners are expected to vote for secession in overwhelming numbers in the January referendum mandated by the 2005 CPA.

But even U.S. policymakers are divided on how to proceed in Sudan and avert a conflict that would destabilize much of Africa at a time when it becoming a major supplier of crude oil to the United States while emerging as a nascent battleground in the Western fight against Islamic terrorism.

The hard-line faction, led by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, says Washington should get tough with Sudan's president, Omar Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court in July on charges of war crimes.

The so-called moderates, championed by Scott Gration, a former U.S. Air Force general who is U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy to Sudan, advocate greater engagement with Sudan to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives.

Both sides agree that oil will be the vital factor in what transpires in Sudan in the next few months but the administration has yet to articulate what it plans to do as the threat of more bloodshed looms.

In the north, Bashir is showing little sign of compromise and Khartoum's military forces are reported to have taken over some of the oil fields along the tense north-south frontier.

Recent northern troop activities in Blue Nile Province and South Darfur, a region still wracked by fighting between government-backed militias and rebel tribal forces, have inflamed the crisis.

Gen. Salva Kiir Mayadit, leader of the Government of South Sudan has complained to Bashir about these movements but they continue unabated.

Both the Sudan armed forces under Khartoum's control and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army have been rearming with oil revenues.

In the south, the SPLA forces are being shaken by mutinies and indiscipline stemming from power struggles within the leadership.

Deadly clashes have taken place between rival military units as Salva Kiir's authority is increasingly challenged by renegade generals despite a clear-cut election victory.

The Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank that monitors global security, noted: "Military mutinies are particularly unsettling in South Sudan, where they have a long history of marking the beginning of major conflicts."

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