JUBA, Sudan (AFP)
Former 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 and an important step to prepare for elections scheduled for 2009, citing a barrage of grievances.
"We have deferred the census until sometime this year," information minister Gabriel Changson Chang in the southern government confirmed to AFP.
"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 census aims to prepare for voter registration. Its results will also redraw or confirm the ratio of central power-sharing between north and south.
Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir's National Congress Party, which shares central government with the south's Sudan People's Liberation Movement, condemned the boycott after an emergency meeting late on Sunday.
Beshir himself chaired the meeting, which the official SUNA news agency said was to ask the NCP's SPLM coalition partners to reverse its decision.
NCP spokesman Kamal Obeid told SUNA there could be no justification for the last-minute postponement, and expressed concern about the knock-on effect on the timetable for elections, currently scheduled for 2009. |
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Standing disputes Chang said that 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 population count.
"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 where tensions have risen in recent weeks), Darfur?" he said.
The south cited the north's veto of ethnicity and religion on the census questionnaires as a reason for the delay, although U.N. overseers had said both sides agreed on the compromise formula of northern or southern Sudanese.
"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.
Officials have said parts of Darfur under rebel control and the Egyptian-occupied 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 to be repatriated to the under-developed south before the census, otherwise the count would disadvantage them.
"The government of south Sudan will take measures to make sure they are repatriated before the census is carried out... There is undue influence in Khartoum in preventing the IDPs (internally displaced persons) from coming back to the south," he said. |
