South Sudan ‘heading for secession’
PHOTO | AFP
A priest at Juba’s cathedral shows signs reading “Unity” and “Separation” during Sunday mass on January 16, one day after the historic week-long independence referendum vote ended. Tallies from two oustanding states show that close to 99 per cent of voters chose separation from the north, according to preliminary results published on the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission website.
Juba, Sudan, Friday
Close to 99 per cent of south Sudanese voters chose secession from the north in the referendum, according to preliminary results published today with tallies from two outstanding states.
With 3,197,038 ballots counted, 98.6 per cent had voted to break away in the January 9-15 referendum and become the world’s newest nation, partial results posted on the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission website showed.
Partial results from the last two states that had not yet published any figures confirmed the trend revealed to AFP by polling officials on Wednesday.
In the state of Jonglei, a whopping 99.93 per cent of votes were in favour of secession, the figures showed. Only 77 voters supported Sudan’s unity, while 105 people cast blank or invalid ballots.
The first results from the state of Western Equatoria also revealed that, based on the votes counted so far, 99.5 per cent chose secession.
The results published Friday are incomplete — several hundred thousand votes remain to be counted to account for the 96 per cent turnout announced by officials earlier this week — and final results are due next month.
“Some few counties still remain to submit their results, so the figures are not complete yet, and we are continuing to work hard to finalise the results,” said Aleu Garang Aleu, spokesman for the Southern Sudan Referendum Bureau, which is running the vote in the south.
Some south Sudanese also voted in the north and abroad.
“We are still expecting that the results for the south will be released on January 31, and, allowing time for any appeals, the final result will be announced in Khartoum on February 14,” he said.
The independence vote was the centrepiece of a 2005 peace deal between the Khartoum government and southern rebels that ended a devastating 22-year civil war, the latest round of fighting in five decades of conflict between the mainly Muslim, Arab north and the mainly Christian, African south.
In order for the referendum to be valid, more than 50 per cent of voters must back secession and at least 60 per cent of registered voters must take part. Election officials have previously said that the 60 per cent threshold had been passed. (AFP)
