The people of Southern Sudan will go to the polls from 9 to 15 January to vote on whether the south should secede from the rest of the country. The referendum will be the culmination of the implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended two decades of war between the north and the south, the so called Naivasha Agreement between the Khartoum central government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M)