Sudan SPLM celebrate Obama’s victory

November 29, 2008 (KHARTOUM) — Southern Sudan’s main political power held a celebration today in Khartoum for the victory of Barack Obama in the US presidential elections this month.

The celebration was held at the headquarters of Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) where hundreds of supporters flocked to witness it.

Reuters said that many held up banners marked ‘New Sudan Yes We Can’ – a message that merged an SPLM slogan with Obama’s rallying cry.

Obama’s landslide win of this week’s long awaited elections sent jubilant people all around the world celebrating the rise of a minority to lead the most powerful country in the world. For many it was the impressive success story for the son of a Kenyan man who was a foreign student in Hawaii.

The Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said that the election of Obama is “the beginning of victory for black people”.

The SPLM claimed that Obama “is a descendant of the ‘Luo’ people who live on the banks of the Nile in Sudan and East Africa”.

“His father came from the Luo (tribe), who are from the Nile. The Luo originally moved from Sudan to Kenya,” said Yasir Arman, SPLM Deputy Secretary General.

Arman said members were inspired by Obama’s election as the United States’ first black president.

“It is giving a message to our society that Sudan can do the same, that Sudan can recognize its own diversity,” he said.

“We hope he will be able to give more attention to all of Africa, not just Sudan.”

The Southern movement has been founded with an ideology of the ‘New Sudan’ aiming at creating a country based on equal rights for its citizens including minorities.

The 2005 peace agreement brokered by the US and other western countries ended two decades of civil war between the Arab and Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian and animist black southerners.

The SPLM and the National Congress Party (NCP) are the two main partners of Sudan’s national unity government.

In 2011, southerners will be asked to vote in a referendum on whether they want to be independent or remain part of Sudan. A census is supposed to prelude the elections but has stalled because of cash shortage and disagreement over the process

(ST)