Sudan:A howling wind lifts handfuls of grey, dusty soil into the air before letting it rain down on the mudbrick houses of Jebel Auria refugee camp.
Some 100,000 southern Sudanese survive on this bleak patch of wasteland just outside Khartoum. "My worry is that we are ready to go back home because many of our children died here," says James Ghot Ruach, a chief of his Nuer tribe, at a deserted registration centre for refugees who wants to return to the south.
"But we need to see these political problems settled so we don't have to worry about conflict again."
Almost three years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed between the Khartoum government and southern rebels, the flow of people leaving Jebel Auria remains a trickle.
Conditions in the camps around the capital are miserable. But fraught relations between President Omar el-Bashir's National Congress Party and the former rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), their partners in a government of national unity, means no one is certain that peace is here to last.
Moreover, if this peace breaks down analysts believe the chances of finding a lasting solution to Darfur's conflict in the west will also fade to nothing.
Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar, said a malfunctioning north-south peace deal increases the chances of Darfur's rebels pushing for all-out victory.
"If the CPA is in crisis, the most likely outcome of that would be the southerners seeking separation as a separate state and therefore the options for Darfur within a rump northern Sudan are very much more limited," he said.
"Why not seek military means to achieve their objective even if the chances of getting there are very remote?"
In recent weeks the CPA, which ended a brutal 20-year conflict responsible for 1.5 million deaths, has come close to total meltdown.
In October SPLM ministers walked out of the government complaining that progress on implementing the peace deal had ground to a halt. They said that Khartoum was stalling on its commitment to remove northern soldiers from the south.
And they complained that the NCP had missed a deadline to begin a census in preparation for elections in 2009 as well as rejecting a commission's ruling on the fate of the oil rich Abyei region.
Their walkout prompted an outbreak of rhetoric as the sides talked up the prospect of war.
President Bashir called on northern militias "to open training camps and to gather mujahideen, not for the sake of war but to be ready for anything".
Last week both sides pulled back from the brink.
They agreed that their power-sharing government would shift from Khartoum to the southern town of Juba every three months as part of the peace process.
At the same time they agreed funding for a census and a timetable to withdraw troops either side of Sudan's north-south border.
But analysts say Khartoum has a history of reneging on deals. More importantly the two sides remain deadlocked on the trajectory of the north-south border which runs through Abyei's oil fields.
Mr de Waal said Abyei had the potential to become Sudan's Kashmir - the focal point for dispute.
"I think what this crisis shows is that in the longer term the trust between the parties and the mutual confidence does not exist to allow the CPA to achieve its goal of a Sudan that is united by consensus, by political pact," he said. "And if that is not achieved then in the medium or longer term the chances of war are very, very greatly increased."
With the fate of their home still uncertain, many southern Sudanese prefer to stay in the camps around Khartoum. Many have lived here for 20 years or more after being chased from their homes by Arab militias they once considered friends.
Most are Christians trying to eke out a living in a Muslim land where Sharia law prevails.
Michael Maker (40) fled the south in 1983. First he lived in the foundations of a half-completed house, before the government forced him to move into the squalid camps.
"People want to go home and develop their country . . . but for now we cannot judge what will happen," he said.