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North Sudan ruling party says south vote "broadly fair"

14 January 2011 23:10 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“APA. A senior north Sudanese official said the south’s independence referendum was largely fair and his party would accept the likely vote for secession, a conciliatory gesture that will allay fears of renewed conflict, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
The comments from a leading member of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP), Ibrahim Ghandour, will dispel concerns that the north might try to disrupt the vote in an effort to keep control of the south’s oil reserves.
It would also reduce the risk of a relapse into general north-south conflict after the referendum. Northern and southern leaders remain at odds over some sensitive issues including how to share out oil revenues after a split and the ownership of the Abyei region, where clashes flared as the vote began.
On Friday, southerners started their penultimate day of voting in the week-long referendum on whether to declare independence, a plebiscite that it widely expected to see the underdeveloped region emerge as a new nation.
"We are satisfied with the process and, as it has been declared by the President (Omar Hassan) Al-Bashir, we will respect the outcome of the referendum ... It will most likely be for secession," Ghandour told Reuters in an interview on Friday.
AFRICA’S LONGEST WAR
The poll caps a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north- south conflict fought over religion, ethnicity and oil. It was Africa’s longest civil war and killed an estimated 2 million people, forced 4 million to flee and destabilized the region.
Ghandour, the NCP’s secretary for political relations, said the vote was "broadly fair," despite some reports of supporters of Sudanese unity being intimidated in remote areas of south Sudan’s Bahr El-Ghazal states.
"I think until now the process is going smoothly. The most important thing is that it is going very, very peacefully ... I think it will meet with the standards required," he said in the north’s most disarming comments about the vote yet.
"We still wait to see the final report of our observers as well as international observers." He added: "If secession occurs we are ready to support a new state and we look forward to brotherly relations with our ex-citizens."
The main party in the south welcomed Ghandour’s comments.
"We are very happy to hear that ... It’s amazing," said Anne Itto, a senior official with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). "We respect that they said it but it is not final, for now it is just verbal."
Bashir, who is also leader of the NCP, promised in the past to accept the result, on condition that the vote was free and fair -- a stipulation that led some analysts to think the north might be laying groundwork for a legal challenge.
The National Congress Party had earlier accused the south of widespread fraud during voter registration. But former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said on Thursday his team of monitors believed that the vote had met international standards.
Bashir led a campaign to try and persuade southerners to vote for unity. The north stands to lose a quarter of the country’s territory and most of its known oil reserves.
Ghandour said the NCP had changed its tone as it came to accept separation as the most likely outcome. "Now we are going toward the end of the process. We know the most likely outcome. So the language now should talk about the outcome," he said.
"It is a mixture of sadness and at the same time optimism in the future. We in NCP, while we are very sad if we lose part of our country, feel satisfied that we have implemented a commitment which is the CPA (the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement)."
Ghandour said the north’s promises to accept the vote had nothing to do with incentives from the United States, which has offered to ease punitive sanctions if Khartoum delivered a peaceful vote and resolved its separate Darfur conflict.
Washington’s envoy to Sudan Scott Gration told reporters on Friday that Sudan could be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism by July if Khartoum accepted the vote.
The southern capital, Juba, has been festooned with banners describing the vote as a "Last March to Freedom" after decades of war with the north of Africa’s largest country.