After 34 years of a sham "unity" and war in Sudan, Jacob Akol, a Sudanese himself, thinks "till death us do part" is a bad option for the country. Divorce between North and South is unavoidable if the people are to survive.

Sudan has been forcefully 'united' and at war with itself for 34 of the last 44 years of independence from Britain. An estimated two million people have died as a result and twice that number are refugees within and without its borders.

The only time the Sudanese ever felt truly united was during much of the only decade we were actually divided: 1972-1982. Sudan had two separate governments and parliaments then, following the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972, which created an autonomous South.

With a government and a parliament in the southern region's capital, Juba, the Southerner walked tall in the streets of the national capital, Khartoum, feeling for the first time truly Sudanese; an equal of his northern brother.

The liberties granted to Southerners also liberated Northerners. Northern traditional chains of family and community dictatorship, based on prejudice, ignorance and wanton abuse of Islamic doctrine and Arabic language, began to loosen. It suddenly seemed outdated for northern youths to go about town asserting their Arab origins as being more dominant than, and superior to, their African roots, a lie that had been drummed into them for centuries.

The change was more noticeably so in Moslem women. They discarded the veil and their faces lit up the streets and offices of Sudanese cities and public places, such as hotels and restaurants. The economy looked good too. Tourism was booming. Hotel and factory construction dotted Khartoum's skyline. Agro-industry was expanding by leaps and bounds. Foreign investment was flowing in and old mines were being revived.

There were rumours of plenty of gold and other precious metals. Above all, rumours of vast quantities of crude oil under the southern swamps, likely to equal or rival that of Saudi Arabia, were particularly strong. It all seemed too good to be true for a nation that had gone through so much suffering.

But, we woke up one morning to the national radio - Radio Omdurman - playing marshal music. We knew a coup had or was taking place. It suddenly all seemed like a dream, a nightmare!

The Southern government and parliament denounced the coup and threatened to send to Khartoum the then Juba-based First Division of the Sudanese army to reinstate the architect of unity in diversity, President Jaafar al Nimeiri.

The South's support was broadcast on the weak-signalled Radio Juba. The BBC's monitoring station in neighbouring Kenya picked up Radio Juba loud and clear. Within minutes, the BBC was telling Nimeiri and his supporters that the South was behind them.

Nimeiri bounced back to power by the turn of the afternoon. The unity of the nation never looked so solid; we were back to sweet dreams. Yet, more powerful, insidious and time-tested weapons than military coups were clearly at play. Nimeiri was taunted as the "president for women and infidels" (read southerners). Then, they actually called him "a woman" and "an infidel".

He was pricked and he caught religion really bad. He began to go to the mosque more often than was good for his spiritual or mental health.

Meanwhile, more and more giant foreign oil companies were signing up for explorations. The further south they went the richer the finds. Nimeiri named the wells found in the South "Unity One", "Unity Two", "Unity" this and that, while those over the border in the North were given real location names. Even then, the South refused to be suspicious.

Then came the clincher: a map, which annexed large chunks of southern territory, including most of the oil fields into the North's, was introduced in the national assembly in Khartoum. The aim was to have it endorsed as the legal map of the Sudan, with its new internal borders.

The Addis Ababa Agreement was based on the internal borders existing between North and South on independence day, 1 January 1956. Some southern members of the national assembly found that their own constituencies on the map had become part of the North. They walked out of the assembly in protest.

The Southern region's government, assembly and public cried foul, and they petitioned Nimeiri to punish those who were clearly trying to undermine national unity.

Nimeiri said he would investigate; but the South retorted that there was nothing to investigate. This was clear daylight robbery. What was Nimeiri up to anyway?, they asked. How much did he not know - or knew?! What was all this suspicious naming of the oil wells? What was the new map about, if not the oil?

Suddenly, Nimeiri began to look like the main culprit in the whole deception. What was the South to do now?

Nimeiri gave the answer: he tightened the rope by declaring 'Sharia' (Islamic Law) for the whole country - North and South. Islamic extremists went wild with happiness in the streets of Khartoum, while the Southerner and the Sudanese woman lay low, the latter to re-emerge with a veil on her face.

Public bars, hotel bars, off-licences and even duty free shops at the Khartoum Airport were looted of their alcoholic contents. Nimeiri made a show of it by driving a bulldozer over an estimated $2m worth of Johnny Walker whisky and the like.

Nimeiri embarked on a reckless disregard for the feelings of Southerners. He urged the completion of the Jonglei Canal which would divert huge quantities of the White Nile's waters from entering the southern swamps in order to increase water for irrigation in Northern Sudan and Egypt. The swamps would inevitably shrink, seriously affecting the lives of the Nilotic people who depend on them. Development programmes slated to accommodate these changes were largely ignored.

Nimeiri then announced that the oil refineries would be built in Kosty, a Northern town hundreds of miles from the oil fields in the South. Southerners did not like the sound of it and said so.

So Nimeiri dissolved both the regional government and assembly. That was the end of the Addis Ababa Agreement and the last straw for the South: it was back to the armed struggle which is now in its 17th year.

The Jonglei Canal was the first victim, followed by foreign oil companies who quickly pulled out because they did not wish to be embroiled in what they knew would be a nasty war.

Nimeiri was next. By treating the South the way he did, he had undermined his power base. He was overthrown in a military coup shortly after.

An election, held largely in then relatively peaceful North, took place after a transition. Sadiq el Mahadi became prime minister for the third time. He did nothing to reverse Nimeiri's decisions on the South and the war raged on.

Sadiq, now a refugee himself, was later overthrown in a military coup, led by General Omar Bashir and masterminded by Islamic fundamentalists of the National Islamic Front (NIF), led by Sadiq's own brother-in-law, Dr. Hassan al Turabi.

Bashir and Turabi raised the stakes even higher by declaring a Jihad, (Holy War) against the South. They poured in men and weapons against the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), an armed Southern movement led by Colonel John Garang.

But the more they did so, the more the SPLA got stronger and stronger. The war has now extended deeper into the North, where the pipeline carrying oil to Port Sudan was blown up recently. The government forces in the South remain bogged down in military garrisons.

A cynical Khartoum-based Arabic publication recently complimented and commended Garang for a national place of honour "for having so swiftly dispatched so many young 'Mujahadin' [holy warriors] to meet Allah [God]". Neither Turabi nor Bashir was amused. The publication reportedly met a sudden death. The fate of the editor is not clear.

The war in the Sudan is really a stalemate, with fewer and fewer combatants getting killed. The people bearing the brunt of the war are the unarmed civilians who are mostly women, children and the aged. It is time the warring parties recognised it for what it really is - which sometimes they appear to do.

Not so long ago Dr Turabi told the BBC that "the marriage" was not working; that an amicable divorce between North and South would be the right course to follow. President Bashir himself was quoted in the Gulf as saying that "if letting the South go would bring peace to the Sudan," then he was prepared to live with a separate South.

Seemingly confusing though is the SPLA's public stand that they are fighting for a just, fair and united Sudan. But John Garang has often added that the decision either way must be left to the people of southern Sudan, who will decide in a free and internationally supervised referendum.

This critical point of self-determination for the South was at one time endorsed by the warring parties in one of the countless IGAD-led (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) peace conferences on Sudan. No one held the parties to this initial agreement; as such Khartoum has now reverted to the old, tired ways: buy more weapons.

All sorts of weapons, including terrorism, have been used before in the South. Southerners were once massacred in a wedding party in Wau by Northern troops. Scorch-earth attacks on unarmed villagers have been, and still are, being carried out today in the South by government troops and Arab tribes armed and trained by the government. Indiscriminate bombing has and still is taking place in the South. The result has always been the same: a resolve by the South to resist.

The increasing involvement of the Chinese and some Western oil companies in the development of the Sudanese oil is now misleading Khartoum into thinking that mortgaging the oil for more sophisticated weapons from China and elsewhere will give it an edge on the battlefield.

That the SPLA will acquire similar weapons one way or another, will not occur to Dr Turabi and Gen Bashir - until they have tried them out on the battlefield, just to come to the same old conclusion that there will be no military victory in the South; a waste of time, money and more innocent lives.

If Southern Sudan were Bosnia or Kosovo - or East Timor for that matter - the international community would have forced a fair and just solution on Khartoum a long time ago. But why wish or wait for such eventualities? Have we not seen enough?