South Sudan’s Kiir warns of war if January referendum is delayed

WHAT'S ALLEGED
Al-Bashir accused of dragging feet

• The referendum process is already behind schedule and the international community fears that the delay would prompt the South to unilaterally declare independence sparking a new conflict.
• Voter registration has not started and may now not be ready on time. The north-south border is yet to be demarcated.
  Another referendum will take place simultaneously in the contested oil-rich region of Abyei, where residents will have to decide whether they want to be part of north or south Sudan.
• The commission to run that vote has not yet been appointed. Some international diplomats suspect President Omar al-Bashir has been deliberately dragging his feet over the referendums.

Tensions are rising in Sudan ahead of a high-stakes referendum on self-determination with escalating rhetoric in Khartoum and Juba underlining the risk of a return to war between the two bitter rivals.

On Friday, Southern Sudan President Salva Kiir for the first time openly declared that he would vote for separation on January 9, when voters in the South and in the disputed Abyei region are expected to choose whether to break away from the mainly Arab North.

Addressing hundreds of supporters after arriving in the country from the United Nations summit in New York, Mr Kiir issued his bluntest warning yet that the people of Southern Sudan were ready to fight to secure their right to self-determination.

“The referendum must go ahead on time. It is not a request but a hard-won right earned at the cost of millions of lives. Our partners must understand that on January 9, when the sun rises and before the sun sets, the people of southern Sudan will have voted.”

He said “dangerous instability” would be the outcome of a vote delay.

Mr Kiir’s declaration comes against the backdrop of a series of provocative moves by the North seen as aimed at delaying the referendum.

The commission charged with preparing for the referendum is yet to carry out vital preparations for the vote.

Voter listing is yet to begin after the chairman of the team said he is not satisfied that enough civic education has been done ahead of the exercise.

The North says it will need to send troops to monitor the voting in the South, a suggestion that would never meet with approval in Juba.

More ominously, state media in Khartoum has been raising tensions by claiming people who support continued unity between the North and South are facing intimidation in the South.

The mounting sense of crisis has seen major Western powers move to get the two sides to engage more vigorously to avert a return to war.

Mr Kiir met with the vice president of the Northern government Ali Taha in New York but the Southern president told supporters the two sides “did not agree on anything.”

Tomorrow, talks between the two sides will continue in Addis Ababa after US secretary of state Hillary Clinton requested Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to attempt to broker a deal on outstanding points of contention ahead of the vote.

The referendum on self-determination was part of the ceasefire deal signed in Nairobi in January 2005. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) sought to end one of the most costly conflicts since the Second World War.

Southerners have been fighting since 1955 against a post-colonial arrangement which the British struck with the rulers in Khartoum to keep Sudan a united country.

Residents of the South, mainly black Christians, bitterly resented what they saw essentially as an extension of colonial rule by the mainly Muslim and Arab North.

Grievances against the North’s exploitation of oil in the South with little attempt to invest any proceeds in the region, the brutal enforcement of Sharia law by the military and the status of Southerners as second class citizens led to the rise of a decades-long insurgency against Khartoum.

Under the terms of the CPA, the North and South were to work together for five years in a bid to “make unity attractive” but the South retained a right to decide whether to break away in a referendum.