Sudan extends voter registration after huge turnout

Sudanese authorities said on Friday they would give southerners an extra week to register for a referendum on the independence of their region, but promised the extension would not delay the Jan. 9 vote.

"Southern Sudanese people now have until the 8th of December to register," commission member Achier Deng told reporters in the southern capital Juba.

The announcement will add to concerns over the tight schedule for the politically sensitive plebiscite, already plagued by logistical delays and wrangling between northern and southern leaders.

"The time frame has been revised, but it will not compromise the date of Jan. 9," Deng added of polling day.

"The time frame is tight, but there are days here and there that can be saved," he said, explaining that the registration period had been extended for "technical reasons."

The referendum gives people from the oil-producing south the chance to decide whether they should secede or stay part of Sudan, a vote promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of north-south civil war.

Southern Sudanese began registering for the referendum on Nov. 15, a key phase in the lead-up to the historic vote. The registration process had been due to end on Dec. 1.

About five million south Sudanese are eligible to register for the vote, including those living in the north and an estimated 500,000 to two million who live abroad, according to U.N. estimates.

Southern Sudanese people now have until the 8th of December to register

Commission member Achier Deng

Registration rate remains "extremely" low

The referendum commission said this week that it has registered more than 1.3 million southerners to vote in the south. However a U.N. official said the registration rate remained "extremely" low in the north.

President Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party filed a complaint with the commission earlier this week charging that several registration centers in the north were often situated far from the southern communities living there.

The NCP also claimed that southern Muslims with Arab names had been prevented from registering.

There are 2,794 voter registration centers across the country, 2,629 of them in the south.

In Cairo, two of three designated centers opened on Thursday, the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission's Mary Isaac told AFP, a day after observers from the Carter Center expressed concern about the delayed opening Egypt's referendum centers.

The U.S. non-governmental organization said voter registration had begun in all of the other seven overseas countries where out-of-country voting is being conducted.

Those eligible to vote in the referendum include permanent residents of south Sudan since 1956, when the country gained independence from Britain and those who can trace their ancestry to an established south Sudan tribe.

Distrust between the two sides remains deep and the south's dominant Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) has accused Khartoum of trying to disrupt the vote to keep control of the region's oil.

Sudan's south accused the northern army of carrying out an air strike on an army base in southern Sudan on Wednesday in an attempt to derail the referendum.

The north's army and the ruling National Congress Party, led by President Bashir who is campaigning for unity, have dismissed the accusations.