Sudan: Referendum Voter Books Delivered

North Africa  |  10.25.10   By PoliticsAfrica Staff

Printers delivered hundreds of thousands of long-delayed registration books for Sudan’s southern independence referendum on Sunday, a significant step in delayed preparations for the 2011 vote, organizers said.

United States Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, said after a three-day visit to Sudan that he had a written guarantee from Khartoum that they would respect the outcome of the January 9, 2011 southern referendum on secession, regardless of the outcome.

Preparations are lagging badly and there are fears of a delay of the vote which culminates a peace process begun in 2005 with a deal ending Africa’s longest civil war.

Delays, non-agreement over the sharing out of revenues from the oil produced in the south, and growing north-south tensions over the vote have raised fears of renewed conflict.

South African printers flew 500,000 voter registration books to Khartoum on Sunday, enough for southern voters living in Sudan’s 15 northern states, said the spokesman of the referendum’s organising commission, Jamal Mohamed Ibrahim.

Millions more will soon arrive in the southern capital Juba, he added.

The commission has already started training referendum registration staff, and organisers still hope to start voting on January 9, he added.

“That is our hope and it is our aim,” he said.

Under an earlier timetable set out in legislation governing the plebiscite, the whole registration exercise should have been completed three months before the vote.

In a new, contracted timetable issued by the commission this month, voters will now be registered between November 14 and December 1 and the final list of voters will be published on January 4 2011, five days before the start of voting.

The commission still has to print voting forms and Sudan is yet to appoint a commission to organize a simultaneous referendum, promised under the same peace deal, on whether the central disputed Abyei region should join north or south Sudan.

Washington has stepped up diplomatic pressure on Khartoum to hold the vote peacefully and on time.

Kerry met Sudan’s vice president and other ministers on Sunday.

“Just today, the government of Sudan handed me a resolution vowing in concrete language to abide by the outcome of the referendum, whatever it is, and pledging its cooperation with its neighbours to the south on a wide range of economic, political and security issues,” Kerry told reporters as he left the country.

Northern and southern leaders also have to resolve fundamental issues including the position of their shared border, the citizenship of southerners in the north and vice versa, and how they will share oil revenues after the vote

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