KHARTOUM: Southern Sudan’s referendum that is key to a 2005 north-south peace deal is in trouble with only five months to go before its planned date, the vote’s chief organizer conceded on Monday.
A commission made up of five southerners and four from the north has failed since it was formed in June to agree on a secretary general to start work on technical and administrative regulations for the January 9 referendum.
Two northern candidates have been rejected by majority vote and no vote has been held on a hopeful from the south, according to political sources.
"So far we have 63 positions filed, including the commission itself. In these 63, four are northerners and 59 are southerners," Mohammed Ibrahim Khalil, who heads the commission, told AFP.
"So what is all this farce about nominating a person who happens to be a northerner to be secretary general? That would make five northerners to 59 southerners. What is all this farce about?" he asked.
A southern leader warned last week that the January referendum on south Sudan’s independence would be derailed unless the electoral commission swiftly resolved its internal row.
"If the referendum commission within the next two weeks is not able to resolve all the issues that they are facing now, the referendum will be killed off," warned Pagan Amum, secretary general of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
He blamed Khalil for the deadlock and accused him of blocking a vote on a southern candidate as secretary general.
The referendum, a key plank of the 2005 peace deal based on power-sharing that ended a decades-long civil war between north and south Sudan offers southerners independence.
Parliament ratified a key law at the end of last year setting up the vote and the commission responsible for organising it, after nothern and southern leaders overcame a dispute that threatened to jeopardise the peace deal.
"The main obstacle is time," said Khalil. With the commission formed three years behind schedule, "a task which in the view of (provisional) constitution makers should take nearly 42 months, now is required to be done in six months."
But despite the holdups and concentrated timeframe, the commission head denied reports in the media and from southern politicians that he had requested a postponement of the referendum.
"Newspapers and sometimes politicians, for reasons of their own, make me say what I have not said. The memorandum is not requiring a delay," he said, referring to a letter he sent to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.
Khalil pointed out a secretary general had to be nominated to allow for the complex and politically sensitive task of voter registration. After an appeals process, the final list has to be published three months before the referendum.
"Work is being done but of course there is a limit to what you can do things before (the nomination) of the secretary general," he said.
Bashir has repeatedly promised the referendum will go ahead as planned.
Any postponement would require an accord between the SPLM and Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party in Khartoum.
SPLM, the former southern rebel group, fought a 22-year war with the north in which about two million people were killed in a conflict fuelled by religion, ethnicity, ideology and resources, including oil.
