South Sudan: Secession It Is

By Eric Sande

JUBA---Almost 99 percent of Southern Sudanese chose secession from the north in a landmark January 9-15 referendum, paving the way for Sudan to split in two.

Official preliminary results of independence vote shows nearly 99 percent support for break up of Africa's largest country. The results were announced at a ceremony attended by a crowd of several thousand people in the southern capital Juba on Sunday. The figures showed that voter turnout was 98 percent – far above the 60 percent threshold required for the result to be valid.

Mohamed Khalil Ibrahim, who chairs the overall referendum commission, said 58 percent of southerners residing in the north and 99 percent of overseas voters chose to break away.

"The results just announced are decisive," he said. "These results lead to a change of situation that is the emergence of two states instead of one state."

Opening the ceremony with a word of prayer, Episcopalian Archbishop Daniel Deng said,"The prayer I say is that the people of southern Sudan have been waiting for 55 years, the prayer of a country. Bless the name of this land, southern Sudan."

"This is what we voted for, so that people can be free in their own country ... I say congratulations a million times," Southern Sudan's president Salva Kiir told the crowd, who had assembled at the grave of the liberation leader John Garang, who died in a helicopter crash in 2005.

Many of the estimated 2 million southerners who still live in the northern half of Sudan did not register for the referendum, fearing their choice would be manipulated, or registered in the south instead. Still, 58 per cent of the nearly 70,000 people who voted in the north chose secession over unity. The only region in the whole country where unity won out was in south Darfur, where 63 per cent of the 9,253 voters wanted Africa's largest country to stay intact.

The southern government's attention will now focus on several urgent issues that need to be resolved with Bashir's regime before July. They include demarcation of the common border and a decision of what to do about Abyei, a coveted region whose own referendum on whether to join the north or south was postponed after Khartoum insisted that northern nomads be allowed to vote.

There also needs to be a deal on oil. More than three quarters of Sudan's oil reserves lie in the south, but the only pipeline runs through the north.

The south also requires a name; options being considered include Nile Republic and Cush.