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The situation in eastern Sudan has generated little media attention, and opportunities for easterners to negotiate with the government have received little international support.

The east is one of the poorest regions in Sudan, even though it is home to the country's largest gold mine and its major oil pipeline.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the 2005 treaty that ended war between Khartoum and the south, did not address the political and social problems in the east.

And a Libyan initiative to jumpstart talks in Tripoli between easterners and Khartoum in early 2006 failed to get off the ground.

But the signing of a power-sharing agreement in mid-October 2006 has brought hope to a region rich in natural resources but beset by poverty. If fully implemented, it would stabilise one of Sudan's most important regions economically.

Eastern Front rebels control a small strip of land on the border with Eritrea, and have shown they are willing to conduct raids on police stations and bomb pipelines to get Khartoum's attention.

Khartoum has taken the Eastern Front threat seriously, even if the rest of the world has not. The government has prepared for war amid fears that a stable of suicide bombers are prepared to attack military installations in the area and interrupt the flow of oil.

The power-sharing deal gives the Eastern Front one junior minister in Khartoum, assistant to the president and an adviser to the president. It also gets eight parliamentary seats in Khartoum and 10 parliamentary seats in each of the three eastern states, among other posts.

The stakes are high. While the world focuses on ending the atrocities in Darfur, an implosion in the east could ripple across the country, affecting Darfur peace initiatives as well as the CPA.

The Eastern Front

The Eastern Front, formed in 2005, is a coalition of rebels from two ethnically based rebel groups, the Beja Congress and the Rashaida Free Lions.

Both are backed by Eritrea, in response to Khartoum's support for rebels the Eritrean government claims are attempting to destabilize Eritrea.

The Beja Congress first took up arms against the government in 1994.

The Beja, who number 2.4 million, are the largest ethnic group in eastern Sudan and one of the largest ethnic groups in the country. They are Muslims and live as semi-nomads in an extremely undeveloped region.

Their largest support base is in Port Sudan, where thousands of Beja live in expansive slums on the outskirts of town. Severe drought has forced them to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and seek work in the region's cities. But jobs are scarce and many struggle to make a living.

The much richer Rashaida are nomads of Arab descent who migrated from Saudi Arabia in the mid-nineteenth century and still maintain links with the Arabian Peninsula.

The Rashaida incurred Khartoum's wrath when they showed solidarity with Kuwaitis during the first Gulf War, supplying them with hundreds of jeeps after Iraq invaded in 1991.

After suffering killings and torture at the hands of their own government, as well as the confiscation of many of their own vehicles, the Rashaida joined forces with the Beja.

The Eastern Front has links with the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM), the main rebel group in the south, which deployed troops in eastern Sudan, in an area called Hameshkoreb, via Eritrea in the 1990s.

One of Darfur's main rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, is also an ally, offering support from a base in neighboring Eritrea. There are also numerous Darfuri immigrants in eastern Sudan, whom experts believe are ripe for rebel recruitment.

Under the north-south peace deal signed in 2005, the SPLM were required to withdraw troops from Hameshkoreb in February 2006. When and if the SPLM do pull out, it is likely Khartoum will move in, a move the Eastern Front says it will resist.

The picture is further complicated by the adjacent cold war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. If that war turns hot, analysts say Eritrea will likely want to mend relations with Sudan so that it will not be forced to face a threat from an Ethiopian ally.

Relations between Sudan and Eritrea have warmed slightly since southern Sudanese rebels joined the Khartoum government in 2005.

But analysts believe the simplest way for Eritrea to ensure Sudan's neutrality is to withdraw all support for the Eastern Front and stop it from using Eritrea as a conduit for arms and supplies.

If war does erupt between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the U.N. expects 250,000-300,000 refugees from the two countries to flow into eastern Sudan through a heavily mined border region.

Meanwhile, the situation in east Sudan has looked grim for a while. In January 2005, government forces killed at least 20 Beja protesters in Port Sudan and detained more than a dozen members of the Beja Congress for six months, according to Amnesty International.

In early 2006, three Beja Congress leaders were arrested. Amnesty International says they are at serious risk of being tortured.

Humanitarian situation

Eastern Sudan - which comprises the states of Kassala, Gedaref, and Red Sea - is home to some of the most fertile land in the country and large quantities of gas, gold and other minerals. But it is desperately poor.

The rebel-controlled area of eastern Sudan is one of the most underdeveloped regions in the world.

Should skirmishes with government troops lead to all-out war, the humanitarian situation in this area, where mortality rates and malnutrition levels are some of the worst in the country, would sink to an abysmal low.

A joint U.N. survey carried out in 2005 found that nearly half the population in Kassala is chronically malnourished. And the United Nations Children's Fund reported in 2003 that the infant mortality rate in Red Sea state was the highest in the country.

In recent years, persistent drought has meant recurrent food crises and an end to a nomadic way of life for thousands of people, who have migrated to Port Sudan and other urban areas to find work.

To make matters worse, eastern Sudan is virtually cut off from international aid. The only existing humanitarian route into the rebel-controlled territory remains through neighboring Eritrea, despite U.N. attempts to negotiate access for aid agencies via Khartoum.

Most U.N. aid is directed at people who have been uprooted - the region plays host to 395,000 internally displaced people and 145,000 refugees, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the U.N Refugee Agency.

In 2000, U.S. aid group the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which established a base in Eritrea from which to operate, reported rampant disease and no health services.

It also found that only three percent of the population could read and write. The IRC says it wasn't until 2004 that the first books in Bedawit, the Beja language, were published with its help.

The IRC delivered basic health care, clean water, and education services to some 45,000 eastern Sudanese. In March 2006 the U.N. Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) persuaded it to temporarily suspend its activities out of Eritrea in a bid to encourage Sudan to open up humanitarian access from the Sudanese side.

But such efforts, it turns out, might be in vain. It's no secret that Khartoum has long viewed international aid workers with suspicion, and aid agencies often complain of harassment in Sudan.

According to a report by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a number of refugee camps are so poorly resourced that they do not even have plastic tarpaulins to serve as shelter.

Eastern Sudan remains as restricted as Darfur, and with the prospect of more violence looming, Khartoum is unlikely to change tack.