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 النيويورك تايمز : فوز البشير والجنوب علي حافة الانفصال (بالانجليزي)
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April 26, 2010
Bashir Wins Election as Sudan Edges Toward Split
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — Sudan’s incumbent president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, handily won the country’s first multiparty election in more than 20 years, according to results released Monday, offering a glimpse into the kind of lopsided contests that may continue if the nation splits in two next year as expected.
Mr. Bashir received 68 percent of the vote, though many international observers said the election was marred by intimidation, gerrymandering and fraud. Right before the voting started in mid-April, several of the top opposition parties abruptly dropped out of the race, clearing a path for Mr. Bashir.
In southern Sudan, which is preparing to vote on whether to split off from the north and become its own country, the incumbent there, Salva Kiir, prevailed as well, winning 93 percent of the vote to remain president of that semiautonomous region.
The results were neither surprising nor evidence of a sudden blossoming of democracy. But that does not necessarily mean the election was insignificant. It was essentially Step 1 of what could be a very messy divorce.
Southern Sudan is expected to secede next year from Sudan, which could bring turbulence to the largest country in Africa, at nearly one million square miles. The southern Sudanese, who are mostly Christian and animist, have been chafing for independence from northern Arab domination since Sudan became independent in 1956, and have fought two long civil wars with the north since then. Some names for Africa’s next country are already being floated. “New Sudan” is one of them. “South Sudan” is another.
The elections that just finished were an important milestone on the road to the referendum, as laid out in an American-backed peace treaty in 2005 between Mr. Bashir’s ruling party and the southern rebels.
Whether the independence referendum will actually happen, or whether it may set off another war, remain serious concerns. Sudan has been racked by several bloody rebellions at the same time (the worst one was in the south, which claimed more than two million lives). And the track record of Mr. Bashir — who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, accused of playing “an essential role” in the bloodshed in Sudan’s western Darfur region — raises troubling questions.
Many human rights advocates have argued that it was precisely because of these concerns that the Obama administration and other Western powers offered only restrained criticism of a disappointing election.
Opposition officials said that Mr. Bashir, who seized power in 1989 in a coup, used just about every trick in the autocratic handbook — intimidation, violence, bribery and monopolization of the state media — to ensure he did not lose. And this was probably unnecessary. Because of Sudan’s rapid economic growth, Mr. Bashir is quite popular among many voters, and not just urban dwellers.
But the prevailing wisdom among the Western powers seems to have been that avoiding a head-on confrontation with Mr. Bashir was the best way to guarantee that he did not fiddle with the referendum.
Analysts are already sketching the outlines of the two post-referendum Sudans, where democracy will probably be the loser and uncompetitive, predictable election results the norm. The net result, they argue, could essentially be two one-party states with even less democratic space than under the flawed coalition government that rules today.
“Autocracy is the expected outcome on both sides of the border,” said John Prendergast, of the anti-genocide Enough project.
While Mr. Bashir’s territory will shrink considerably if the southern third of the country splits off, he will face even less opposition within it.
Likewise, in the south, Mr. Kiir’s party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which has led the fight for succession for decades and is now the junior partner in the national government, is expected to continue to dominate. Already, it has shown itself seemingly allergic to dissent, despite billions of dollars in aid money and democracy-building projects that the United States has pumped into southern Sudan. During the last several weeks, the S.P.L.M. was accused by election observers of harassing and beating up opposition candidates.
Mr. Prendergast said that a few years ago, many people hoped Sudan was going to “remake itself as a tolerant, fair and united state.”
But Mr. Bashir’s party “slammed the door on this vision,” Mr. Prendergast said. “It has become a party of those newly enriched by the oil bonanza.”
The fiercest custody battle in the coming split will most likely be over that oil, about 500,000 barrels a day; a drop compared with Saudi Arabia’s output but enough to roughly double Sudan’s per capita income in the last 10 years, though the benefits have hardly been shared equally.
The most productive oil fields in the country lie in southern Sudan or along the unresolved north-south border, which could become the new focus of attention now that the election is over. Few believe that Mr. Bashir, who used oil money to transform Khartoum into a clean, orderly and increasingly modern capital on the banks of the Nile, is ready to let go of this revenue stream.
But Zach Vertin, an analyst for the International Crisis Group who lives in southern Sudan, argues that oil could also be the glue that keeps the two sides civil to each other.
“As both regimes rely so heavily on oil revenues, finding a suitable arrangement is a mutual interest and a matter of political survival,” he said. “Alternative export routes may be an option for South Sudan at some stage, but such alternatives will not be available overnight, and thus the parties will need each other in the interim.”
Right now, north and south Sudan are tied together by a 1,000-mile pipeline that runs from southern Sudan to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, a physical sign of how reliant the two sides are on each other.
There is also the question about what independence portends for the continent. Some analysts worry that if Sudan splits in two, it could embolden separatist movements in other parts of Africa, something the African Union has been very sensitive about since its inception in the 1960s.
But the southern Sudanese say that is not their problem.
“The people of south Sudan have never wanted to be outside of Sudan; it has been the political system that has marginalized them,” said John Duku, an S.P.L.M. representative in Nairobi. “Nobody, I repeat nobody, can prevent us from having this referendum. The international community should realize this and save everybody a war.”
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