NEARLY 99 per cent of southern Sudanese voters chose secession in this month’s independence referendum, clearing the way for Sudan to split in two.
The official preliminary results were announced at a ceremony attended by a crowd of several thousand people in the southern capital, Juba, yesterday.
The figures also showed voter turnout was 98 per cent – far above the 60 per cent threshold required for the result to be valid.
Subject to confirmation of the final result next month, and pending legal challenges, southern Sudan will be free to declare independence on July 9th.
“This is what we voted for, so that people can be free in their own country . . . I say congratulations a million times,” southern Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, told the crowd. It had assembled at the grave of liberation leader John Garang, who died in a helicopter crash in 2005.
The ceremony ended with the people singing of “the promised land”, something southerners have dreamed of since colonial rule ended in the 1950s and the Arab-led government in Khartoum took power. Decades of marginalisation and conflict followed, with the most recent north-south war from 1983 to 2005 causing about two million deaths.
The peace agreement that ended the war gave southerners the option to secede through a referendum after a six-year interim period. Such was the anticipation before the vote that hundreds of thousands of people queued before dawn across the region to cast their ballots on January 9th even though the voting booths were to be open for a week.
Many people feared President Omar al-Bashir’s regime in the north – which opposes secession – would try to disrupt the vote, but this did not happen.
This, added to Mr Bashir's comments that he wanted to enjoy "brotherly" relations with the south, led to rare praise for the often-maligned leader, both internationally and in southern Sudan. – ( Guardianservice)