SUDANESE President Omar al-Bashir has said that he will celebrate Sunday’s independence referendum on independence, even if south Sudan votes for secession.
On a rare visit to the southern capital, Juba, President Bashir told southern officials that he would be sad if Sudan split, but happy if there was peace between the two sides.
“I am going to celebrate your decision, even if your decision is secession,” Mr Bashir said in a speech broadcast live on television. “The preferred choice for us is unity but in the end we will respect the choice of the southern citizens,” he told southern officials. “One would be sad that Sudan has split but also pleased because we witnessed peace.”
Almost four million voters, about half the south Sudanese population, have registered to vote in the January 9th independence referendum that will decide the fate of Africa’s biggest country.
The referendum is the centrepiece of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed between North and South Sudan. It brought an end to the 22 year long civil war in the country, which killed at least 2 million people and displaced millions of others.
Offering to give technical and logistical support to south Sudan in the event of a vote for independence, Mr Bashir struck a more conciliatory tone than usual, an indication not only that the south will choose to split but also of how interdependent both states will be on one another in the future. About four fifths of Sudan’s oil is located in the south of the country, but it has to be shipped to the northern city of Port Sudan for export.
However, key issues between both sides have yet to be resolved. They include the final demarcation of the border between both sides, the sharing of oil revenue, responsibility for $38 billion in foreign debt and the future of the disputed region of Abyei. Claimed by both sides, it is expected to take hold a separate referendum to decide its future, although the final date for such a vote has yet has yet to be set.
Anti-northern sentiment runs high in the south, where people believe that the government in Khartoum has failed to invest in infrastructure and services in the region. Many regard this as a policy carried forward from colonial days, when Northern Sudan was run by a separate pro-Arabist administration of Oxbridge graduates and the south by the derisorily named ‘bog barons’.
Suspicion is heightened by the fact that the north is mainly Muslim and the south Christian.
On the streets of Malakal, the capital of Upper Nile State, people were nonplussed about Mr Bashir’s visit.
“We’ll never vote for unity,” said Philip Manytung Awin, a village chief from the Shilluk tribe on the way to rally the community to get out and vote.
“We are Christians and they are Muslims. You can’t mix a cat and a dog. He knows we are going away, so of course he is more relaxed” said elder Andrew Yor Gajow.