Sudan Referendum: Southerners Flood Home to Vote in Post-War Secession Poll
AFRICA, 10 Jan 2011
Tens of thousands of Sudanese are flooding ‘home’ ahead of a vote on Sunday [9 Jan 2011] which is expected to split Africa’s largest country in two and create the world’s newest nation.
By Nile river barge, overloaded bus or sputtering motorcycle, 120,000 people have returned to the country’s south from its north in the last four weeks.
Sudan’s Arab northerners fought its Christian southerners for 22 years in a conflict which killed two million people and left the south in shatters.
The final plank of a 2005 peace deal ending the civil war, Africa’s longest, is Sunday’s poll on whether the country stays united or the southern third secedes.
All expectations are that the four million registered voters, all southerners, will choose to create their own country – which was the central aim throughout the war.
Parades and marches took place through the streets of Juba, the southern capital, past a clock tower in the mushrooming city’s centre counting down the days, hours and minutes to Sunday’s poll.
“This is the thing our fathers and uncles fought for, this is what they died for, a free and independent South Sudan,” said Kuol Bol, 24, who joined the parade through Juba on his motorbike taxi.
But there are many challenges ahead.
South Sudan, if it becomes a new country, will be one of the world’s poorest, a place where little more than two per cent of children complete primary school and where health care, roads and electric power are all but non-existent.
“The chronic poverty, lack of development and the threat of violence that blight people’s daily lives will not disappear after the referendum,” said Melinda Young, head of Oxfam in southern Sudan.
Whatever the outcome of the vote, these long-term issues need to be addressed. Failure to do so risks undoing any progress made in the past few years.”
There are concerns that Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president and the only head of state wanted for genocide by the International Criminal Court, may try to block secession.
Most of Sudan’s oilfields lie in its south.
“The revenue from this oil is vital for both governments and demonstrates that southern and Northern Sudan will continue to be bound together and interdependent even if southern Sudan becomes independent,” said Roger Middleton at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
Go to Original – telegraph.co.uk
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