South Sudan referendum wraps up

JUBA, SUDAN—Southern Sudan’s week-long referendum on independence ended Saturday with observers praising the conduct of the vote and a top official of President Umar al-Bashir’s ruling party saying the oil-rich region would likely secede.

More than 80 per cent of the almost 4 million registered voters cast their ballots, surpassing the 60 per cent needed for a valid result, said Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, chairman of the commission that organized the referendum. The final vote count will be announced next month; independence, if approved, will be declared in July.

“I have watched a number of elections in this country and I think this has been the most peaceful, the most orderly and the quietest,” he told reporters Saturday in Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan.

A vote for independence will give the south control of almost 80 per cent of Sudan’s current oil production of 490,000 barrels a day, pumped mainly by China National Petroleum Corp., Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional and India’s Oil & Natural Gas Corp.

Sudan’s oil output is the third-biggest in sub-Saharan Africa.

“The referendum is being conducted with a big degree of fairness. The expected result is secession,” Rabie Abdel Ati, a senior member of Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party, said Saturday from Khartoum, the capital. “Accepting the results has become inevitable.”

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said Saturday that his Carter Center monitors witnessed a “very orderly process” with “tremendous enthusiasm and excitement in the south,” where the bulk of registered voters cast their ballots. Turnout in the polling stations that his monitors observed averaged almost 90 per cent, he said in Khartoum.

The referendum was the centrepiece of a 2005 peace accord that ended a civil war which lasted almost 50 years, except for a ceasefire from 1972 to 1983, between the Muslim north and the south, where Christianity and traditional religions dominate. About 2 million people died in the second phase of the conflict.

Al-Bashir and his southern counterpart, Salva Kiir, must negotiate how to share oil revenue, set borders, apportion responsibility for Sudan’s $38 billion foreign debt and reach a settlement on Abyei, a disputed border region where two ethnic groups clashed this month, claiming as many as 76 lives.

Carter said he expected the talks on the borders and Abyei to resume after the results were announced.

Referendum commission chairman Khalil acknowledged the vote would likely result in the division of the former British colony.

“I don’t derive any pleasure from announcing the splitting of Sudan in two,” he said told reporters in Juba Saturday. “On the contrary, I would rather have hoped the country would remain united.”