We're in a hurry. Great hurry.

Dear Sir/Madam!

We're in a hurry. Great hurry.

On January 9, an independence referendum will be carried out in the Southern Sudan, which will almost certainly succeed. Sudan will break up into two parts, and the African continent will get a new country. It sounds promising; however, the potential consequences would be fatal for the broader region. The Southern Sudan contains 85 percent of all of the Sudanese oil, the main Sudanese export product, which is the cause of the 22-year-long civil war between the north and the south that never really ended. Khartoum will not give up oil just like that since it was the reason for China’s support, the new colonising power in Africa and the ruler of the third world. We must not forget the water and the wealth of the Nile. The south has announced that it would never again obey anyone else.

Will there be another round of war? How will the referendum in the Southern Sudan affect Africa’s future? What will be its security and geostrategic impacts? Will the marshes of the Southern Sudan really become the first battlefield of the Chinese-American war? Where is the international community hiding? And, most of all, the European Union?

What should be done and what went wrong will be the topic of the discussion on Tuesday, 21 December 2010, in Kino Dvor in Ljubljana between the most active fighter for the oppressed Sudanese nations Tomo Križnar, who has just returned from Darfur, the Delo Newspaper journalist and correspondent from the crisis areas Boštjan Videmšek, the Delo Newspaper commentator Branko Soban and the professor at the Faculty of Arts Dr. Marko Polič. Everyone who will attend is kindly invited to equally participate in the discussion and to take a look at Križnar's new book Oil and Water.

Kindly invited!

Who will come and think if not you.

Tomo Križnar and Boštjan Videmšek