Delays hit south Sudan census key to vote – official
March 5, 2007 (JUBA, Sudan) — A census in south Sudan that is vital to the success of elections and a referendum on the oil-rich region’s possible secession may be delayed 6 months to January 2008, a census official said on Monday.
Delays in receiving funds from the Sudanese government are jeopardising the timely implementation of the national census in the semi-autonomous south, the official said.
A January 2005 peace deal to end Sudan’s 21-year north-south civil war includes a provision for a referendum in the south by 2011 on whether to secede from the north.
But preparations have been slow for a census, key to successful parliamentary and presidential elections foreseen by the end of 2009 and the referendum. The census official said a planned June 30 start date for the census was now unworkable.
“In my personal opinion a realistic start would be January 2008,” said Isaiah Chol Aruai, head of the Southern Sudan Commission for Census, Statistics and Evaluation.
“We have not received any money for 2007 yet,” he said, adding that a pilot census that had been scheduled for November 2006 had been postponed due to delays in financing and may now take place in April.
Aruai said the southern census office was still waiting for about $600,000 from the 2006 budget. Sudan has budgeted $73.7 million for the national census, of which $30 million should come in 2007.
A north-south boundary commission was supposed to have demarcated the frontier between north and south, but delays in forming and funding this commission have further complicated the southern census bureau’s work, Aruai said.
But he added he expected that problem would be resolved before the census.
The north-south civil war, separate from the ongoing conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region, broadly pitted the Islamist Khartoum government against mostly animist or Christian southern rebels.
Complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology, the war killed 2 million people and drove some 4 million from their homes.
(Reuters)