Formerly warring north and south Sudan were at loggerheads on Sunday as the south pulled out of a national census, a cornerstone of their fragile peace agreement, citing a barrage of grievances.
”We have deferred the census until sometime this year,” the information minister in the southern government, Gabriel Changson Chang, confirmed just two days before the April 15 to 30 population count was to begin.
”We feel that if we were to carry out the census now it would not achieve the objectives for which it was intended, so we need more time to work on some of the issues,” he added, citing November or December as a better date.
Cash-flow problems and logistic headaches have dogged preparations for the repeatedly delayed population count, a crucial part of the 2005 comprehensive peace agreement (CPA) that ended Africa’s longest-running civil war.
The council of ministers convened an extraordinary meeting on Sunday and south Sudan leader Salva Kiir flew to Khartoum for emergency talks with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.
Al-Bashir’s National Congress party, which sits in an uneasy coalition with Kiir’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, condemned the boycott and called for the reversal of the shock decision that caught the United Nations unaware.
Party spokesperson Kamal Obeid said there could be no justification and expressed concern about the knock-on effect on the timetable for elections due in 2009.
The census is to prepare for voter registration. Its results will also redraw or confirm the ratio of power-sharing between north and south in the central government.
‘Very serious’ stand-off
UN diplomats were scrambling to solve what one international official described as a ”very serious” stand-off between north and south that threatened to squander a UN investment in the census of $65-million.
Kiir is scheduled to meet the UN envoy to Sudan, Ashraf Qazi, on Monday following his meeting with al-Bashir.
”The international society here in Juba has reacted very strongly. They have invested so much money and been working for months. If it’s called off like this, he [Kiir] will weaken his position,” said one UN official.
But Chang said various disputes with the north, which he said have not been resolved under the slipping timetable to implement the 2005 peace deal, must be addressed or completed before the south approves the census.
”There is no peaceful atmosphere. Why don’t we talk about those pending issues, the border issues, Abyei [an oil-rich area claimed by both north and south], Darfur?” he said.
Southern leaders cited the north’s rejection of any questions about ethnicity or religion in the census returns as a reason for the delay, although UN overseers had said a compromise had been reached between the two sides.
”Sudan is an African country because the majority of Sudanese people are Africans, which contradicts directly the claim we are an Arab nation. This can only be proved through an objective exercise like the census,” said Chang.
The Arab domination of power in what is Africa’s largest country was a major reason for the two-decade civil war between north and south, as well as for the separate five-year conflict in the western Darfur region.
Officials have said parts of Darfur under rebel control and the Egyptian-held Halayib triangle in the northeast will be excluded from what will be Sudan’s fifth census since independence in 1956.
Chang said two million displaced southerners living in the north must be given the clear option of repatriation to the underdeveloped south ahead of the census, otherwise the count will disadvantage them.
”There is undue influence in Khartoum in preventing the IDPs [internally displaced persons] from coming back to the south,” he said.
New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch said militia attacks in disputed border areas may reflect an attempt by Khartoum to skew census registration.
The director of the central bureau of statistics, Yasin Haj Abdin, the civil servant in charge of the population count, issued a statement denying it was necessary for IDP or border issues to be resolved before the census.
He said the prospect of IDPs returning and new field work to map expected returnees by the end of the year would be impossible because of the rainy season. — Sapa-AFP