wednesday 22 december 2010 - Juba, South Sudan - Workers offload voting ballot forms printed in the UK for the South Sudan referendum, from an airplane at Juba airport. The plane carrying more than 7.3 million ballot forms and was surrounded by security forces and U.N. officials. The referendum on whether the oil-producing region should declare independence, scheduled for January 9, 2011 is the climax of a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north-south conflict - Africa's longest civil war that was fought over ethnicity, religion, ideology and oil and that killed 2 million people. Photo credit: Benedicte Desrus