Khartoum, January 18: Secession of Christian and Animist south Sudan would be suicidal because of tribal conflicts and the weak government there, a key presidential hopeful for elections in the vast semi-autonomous region has said.
“Under the present weak government in the south, calling for secession would be suicide,” Lam Akol told reporters late Sunday in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
Akol, who broke away last year from the ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) that governs the south, said secession would turn south Sudan into another Somalia, which has been largely lawless and unstable for more than a decade.
“At the moment, with the state of hostility in the South, with the state of tribal conflicts, intra-tribal conflicts, any call for secession at this moment will be a call for the ‘Somalisation’ of southern Sudan,” said Akol, who heads the breakaway SPL-Democratic Change.
Akol will lead a coalition of small southern parties in Sudan’s first general elections in 24 years which is due to take place in April, to run again the mainstream SPLM.
The SPLM chose the current president of the region Salva Kiir, a former rebel commander who is also first vice president of all Sudan who favours independence as its candidate.
Akol said that his group’s position on independence “is determined by conditions on the ground.”
The CPA provided for a general election this April and an independence referendum for the south in January next year.
Violence killed some 2,500 people in southern Sudan in 2009 and displaced more than 350,000 in the under-developed region.
Relations between the two SPLM factions are at an all-time low.
The SPLM had banned Akol’s group from political activities in the south, charging that the splinter group was not a party but an armed faction.
But a Sudanese court on Sunday ruled against the ban.
—Agencies