Historic day ahead after decades of war

Several million people will decide in the next week or so whether to give birth to the world’s newest nation.

They will cast ballots on whether to declare independence at polling stations sprinkled across the vast, flat plains of Southern Sudan, an East African landscape long riven by chaos.

War and famine have ravaged generations in the south for as long as anyone can remember. Fighting forced more people from their homes than in any other nation on earth. Hope remained elusive.

Yet the vote has given many southerners the rare sense of exhilaration that is borne of new beginnings.

From January 9 to January 15, the black Christians and animists in the autonomous region of Southern Sudan will vote on whether to declare independence from a northern government dominated by Arab Muslims. The two sides fought a war that killed 2 million people from 1983 to 2005, when a peace treaty set the stage for the upcoming vote.

Nearly 4 million have registered to cast ballots. Few doubt the outcome.

“I have not encountered a single Southern Sudanese who is interested in voting for unity. I would say at least 98 percent of them will vote for separation,” says Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, a former foot soldier in the southern rebel force who now leads the Southern Sudan’s mission in the United States. “This is what we have been fighting for for more than 50 years.”

Jeremiah Awin says he spent more than 10 years fighting with southern rebels. He has no desire to pick up a gun again.

“Now is the time for peace,” he says in the bustling southern capital, Juba. “I will vote safely for separation.”

Daniel Akot, another southerner in Juba, agrees. “I need separation to be peaceful because I have grown up in the war, and I don’t want my children to grow up in the war,” he says.

Voters will receive a ballot with two pictures: One hand signifies independence; two hands, a unified Sudan.

Most everyone agrees that the majority of southerners will choose independence, but there is less certainty about what will happen after the votes are tallied.

The new nation would face daunting obstacles, from a desperate need for development to the lack of a robust educated class to control the new levers of power.

A flood of refugees, eagerly returning to an independent homeland, could complicate matters in a place that already lacks enough schools and clinics and has few paved roads.

Long-standing grievances among rival southern groups could erupt in violence — several hundred southerners already have been killed in such fighting in the last year or two. Or the north could decline to accept the results or stir tensions by trying to pit one southern faction against another.

The concerns run so deep that last February Dennis Blair, then the director of national intelligence, warned the U.S. Congress of possible genocide.

“A number of countries in Africa and Asia are at significant risk for a new outbreak of mass killing” in the next five years, he said. “Among these countries, a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in Southern Sudan.”

Looming over concerns about the future is a suspicion that many in the south harbor of Sudan’s rulers in the north.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, wanted for war crimes after mass killings and rape in the country’s western Darfur region, says that a southern vote for independence would be like “cutting off a part of the nation’s body but not the end of the world.”

“We are a civilized people,” he said this week in a rare visit to Juba. “Regardless of how painful the results are, we will greet the result with forgiveness, and patience, and acceptance, and an open heart, God willing.”

Al-Bashir also has said that his government will not hesitate to accept the results “because peace is our ultimate goal in our relationship with our southern brothers, even if they choose a path other than unity.”

Yet many worry that the northern-based government will interfere with the referendum, decline to recognize its outcome or stoke tensions between rival southern factions.

The possibilities concern Abdullahi An-Na’im, a native of northern Sudan who teaches law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a former executive director of Human Rights Watch for Africa and an expert on Islamic law, or sharia. Authorities in Sudan imprisoned him in the 1980s for opposing the imposition of Islamic law in all of Sudan.

He looks to the past for clues to the future.

“The history of Sudan is such that I cannot expect the northern government to have the grace and humanity to let the south go peacefully,” he says.

Tags: Africa