Juba, September 28: There is a “real chance” that the 2011 referendum on the future of South Sudan will lead to a vote for the region to break away from Africa’s largest nation, the regional president said on Sunday.
Sudan is at “a historic crossroads,” Salva Kiir told political party leaders at a conference in the south Sudan capital.
An estimated two million people died in two decades of civil war which ended in 2005 with the signing of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement proposing national elections in 2010 then a referendum in 2011 on the future status of the south.
“The two possibilities of unity and secession, without speculating the results of the referendum, are real. Consequently wisdom dictates us that we prepare ourselves to both eventualities,” Kiir said.
Between now and the referendum date, Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir’s National Congress Party (NCP) and Kiir’s Sudan People?s Liberation Movement (SPLM) have pledged to promote the unity of Sudan, which is split between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south.
However, the two parties are at loggerheads over implementation of the agreement, notably about the organisation of a democratic process under which the results of a recent census are scheduled to be the basis for electoral constituences for the 2011 vote.
“Without the resolution of this issue the election process may be put on jeopardy,” Kiir said.
“To us in the SPLM unity is a noble cause, but not any unity. Unity that does not generate a value-added to the present status of South Sudan does not attract anybody,” the president of the semi-autonomous south told the conference.
Hosted by Kiir’s party and continuing until Tuesday, the Juba conference has brought together around 20 Sudanese political party leaders including former prime minister Sadek el-Mahdi, head of Umma, and Islamist opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi.
Beshir’s NCP, the Democratic Unionist Party and some other small parties are boycotting the event.
The organisers are seeking a “national consensus” on implementation of the peace agreement, on the April elections and also on the continuing conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan.
The voting scheduled for next April will include the first presidential, parliamentary and regional elections since 1986. A presidential election in 1989 confirmed Beshir in a leader after he seize power in coup but the opposition denounced the exercise as a charade.
“The NCP is absent because it is a political failure. The NCP is facing a political crisis itself. (Its leaders) are concerned only about survival so they are not thinking politically, they are not acting politically,” Mubarak al-Fadl, head of a major wing of Umma, told AFP.
The NCP said it was boycotting the conference because the SPLM had not met its conditions for attendance.
–Agencies