There's a lot of wishful thinking in the early coverage of Wednesday's ruling on Sudan's disputed Abyei region. AFP says that "North and south Sudan have accepted" an international panel's decision to shrink Abyei's borders and hand control of a major oilfield to the northern government. AP judges that it "bolsters peace in Sudan" by drawing a "compromise map" that both sides can live with. Reuters initially reported that the ruling's impact wasn't clear and then updated the story with a more hopeful headline: "Hague border ruling raises peace hopes in Sudan."

Have we learned nothing? In Sudan, the first rule is: Don't believe anything you hear.

Friends who know the country better than I do are calling the ruling a let's-avoid-war decision (Bec Hamilton) or "a careful deal designed to keep both sides happy" (Rob Crilly). Southern Sudan gets most of the Abyei region, a crucial and resource-rich bridge between north and south, ahead of a planned 2011 referendum on secession. Northern Sudan gets control of the Heglig oilfield - not one of the oil-producing region's biggest prizes, but an important footprint. Officials on both sides were saying the right things Wednesday. But the devil will be in the implementation.

Control of Abyei is such a thorny issue that it was left unresolved in the 2005 peace agreement that ended the two-decade north-south civil war. Last May, tensions exploded in a battle between northern and southern forces that left the entire town of Abyei burned to the ground, killed dozens of people and sent tens of thousands fleeing. I don't think anyone truly believes that control of the surrounding region will be resolved with the stroke of a pen from judges based 4,000 miles away.

I can only guess that the optimistic headlines represented the world's desire that Sudan take steps toward peace. The Sudanese themselves are less sanguine. Shortly after the ruling was announced I was on the phone with a Southern Sudan official in Kenya. He'd been away from his desk and didn't know the decision. When I told him, there was a long silence. "That is unjust," he said. "This is going to cause problems." The North, for its part, has a long history of reneging on agreements or implementing them as it sees fit. Khartoum is deeply opposed to southern secession - and Abyei figures to vote in a separate election in 2011 to join the south.

And yet President Obama's new special envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, says (via AFP): "The commitments that these folks have made in words, I'm convinced that they will be carried out in deed, and that this arbitration decision will be fully implemented, the border will be demarcated, and the Dinka and the Misseriya (rival groups who each claim rights to Abyei) will live for a long time in peace." I commend Gration for traveling to Abyei ahead of the decision, but his optimism is wildly misplaced. He and the rest of the international community will need to remain engaged much, much longer in order to ensure that both sides live up to their pledges -- or, more likely, to sound the alarm bell when they don't.

UPDATE: The first signs of dissatisfaction in southern Sudan? Senior SPLM (southern) officials say Heglig and Bamboo oil fields don't really belong to the north, as the panel determined. Deng Alor, the respected southerner who's foreign minister in the Khartoum government, calls these "gray areas." Wonder what other "gray areas" will crop up in the coming weeks and months... (Hat tip to Oxfam's Alun McDonald