South Sudan Votes Peacefully
The New York Times reports:
JUBA, Sudan — As voters continued flooding the polls on Monday for a landmark referendum on southern Sudan’s independence, officials said more than 40 people had been killed over the weekend in intense skirmishes in a contested area along Sudan’s north-south border.
The voting, which began Sunday, is proceeding jubilantly and remarkably smoothly, with high expectations and few serious complaints anywhere across southern Sudan. But if the referendum passes and the south breaks off from the north, the disputed border will become the next issue to resolve, and some fear that the specter of an all-out border war is rising.
Abyei, where skirmishes broke out Friday and Saturday, is considered the most combustible and intractable of all the disputed areas. Both the north and the south claim historical ties to it and are refusing to budge. Some Western analysts have called Abyei “Sudan’s Jerusalem.”
Most people here in Juba, the southern capital, were unaware of the rising tensions along the border, which is several hundred miles away. Voters continued to pour into polling places on Monday, to dance, whistle and sing, and to talk excitedly about how secession will bring new bridges, new roads, new schools, new hospitals, new jobs, even new food.
“You’ll be able to eat what you want and do what you want,” said Daniel Bior Garang, who voted for secession.
Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president who is in Sudan observing the election, said the sky-high hopes reminded him of the 1960s, when so many Africans broke free from their colonial masters. “The great excitement of liberation comes with high expectations,” he said. The trick, he added, will be meeting them.
The biggest challenge southern Sudan will face, he said, is avoiding the same pitfall that plunged Sudan into civil war decades ago: unequal development.
Though the north-south civil war has often been simplified as a battle between the Christian and animist south versus Arab rulers in the north, the south itself is very diverse. It is home to Christians, animists and Muslims; scores of ethnic groups and dozens of languages; traditional people whose lives revolve around cows and more modern people who worship cash.
“They have to manage this diversity carefully, giving all the groups a sense of belonging,” said Mr. Mbeki, who has been the lead mediator between the north and the south on separation. “If not, you will get the same fractures that took place in the whole of Sudan in south Sudan.”
Around Abyei, those fractures have already become violent. According to elders of the nomadic Misseriya people, who roam the Abyei area and are aligned with the Sudanese government in Khartoum, southern soldiers shelled their camps, slaughtered their cattle and killed more than 10 civilians over the weekend.
“I just buried 13 of my people,” said Sadig Babo Nimir, a Misseriya leader who spoke by telephone from Khartoum.
In retaliation, the Misseriya attacked southern Sudanese security officers, killing several and capturing their gun trucks and weapons, Mr. Sadig said. “As Misseriya, we don’t want anything but peace,” he added. “We are just defending ourselves.”
Southern officials tell a different story. Philip Aguer, spokesman for the southern military, said that the Misseriya attacked police officers first and that the nomads “are not moving with cattle, they are moving with machine guns.” He said the Misseriya had been armed by the Khartoum government to “disrupt the referendum.”
Despite fears of mounting tensions, southern Sudan may surprise its doubters. In a way, it already has. After all the doomsday talk and fretting about whether the south was capable of holding the referendum, or whether it would be delayed or chaotic, voting seems to be going well. Thousands of people lined up once again before dawn on Monday, though the crowds in Juba were not nearly as large as on Sunday.
