ALL BEING well on Sunday, up to four million voters will come out to decide the fate of impoverished southern Sudan. By most accounts more than 90 per cent are believed likely to back secession from the north of a region the size of France, splitting Africa’s largest country in two.
All being well. Most of the region and much of the international community is holding its breath, fearful that the poll will unleash another round of the violence which cost two million lives before a 2005 peace agreement that granted limited autonomy to the south for five years, followed by a vote on independence. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has called the situation “a ticking time bomb”.
Yet, despite deep mistrust and a bloody history between the north’s Islamist government and former rebels who lead the south, there has been a growing confidence among observers, including 10,000 UN peacekeepers, that the poll may pass off quietly and that the continent’s newest state may yet emerge peacefully and defy the dangerous precedents of previous partitions or break-ups such as India or Yugoslavia.
Just last week Sudan’s president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who visited the south yesterday for further talks, publicly pledged to help his “southern brothers”, promising to be “the first to recognise the south”. “The ball is in your court,” he told a rally. Bashir, currently under indictment for war crimes at the International Criminal Court, seems determined to play a more pragmatic game now, partly perhaps prompted by the US promise that it will remove Sudan from a list of state sponsors of terrorism if it honours the peace accord. EU aid may be forthcoming also.
The situation remains precarious, however. The precise border line between the two states and the division of oil revenues have yet to be finalised. Three-quarters of the country’s oil reserves are in the south, but pipelines must run through the north and, though a difficult issue, the former appears willing to share revenues as the price of independence.
There has been no agreement as yet also on holding a parallel vote in the sensitive oil-rich Abyei region which sits on what will be the new border. The dominant Ngok Dinka tribe favours secession, but the north is insisting nomadic herders of the Misseriya tribe should get a vote also. Observers warn that even minor disputes involving militias aligned to either of the tribes could trigger a much wider, disastrous north/south conflict.