Sudan elections show up deep divides

Sudan elections show up deep divides

Two Sudanese refugee women check their names on the registered voters list at a polling station in the refugee camp of Zamzam at the outskirts of the Darfur town of Al-Fasher, Sudan, on Tuesday. (AP)

By ANDREW HEAVENS | REUTERS

KHARTOUM: Sudan's elections were set up under a peace deal designed to unify the country — but in Khartoum they are showing up the oil-producing nation's deep divides.

In the center of the desert capital, the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) has rolled out a slick operation with video displays, banners, t-shirted volunteers and long lines of police and security officers outside polling stations voting en masse.

Just forty minutes drive away from the center a different scene is unfolding.

Walking through the sprawling slums on the outskirts of Khartoum — home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from the south, Darfur and other parts of Sudan's periphery — you might not know the country was half way through its first multi party vote in almost a quarter of a century.

Any spark of election fever that might have been building up was snuffed out by the last minute withdrawal of Yasir Arman, presidential candidate for south Sudan's dominant Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM).

The SPLM is boycotting most voting in northern Sudan, complaining that President Omar Bashir's NCP has rigged the vote.

"It was a shameful that he (Arman) did not stand," said one man from the capital's Mandela camp, who declined to give his name. "Now I will vote for no one." "Most of the people are not voting here. Everyone is too busy chasing a living. Everyone knows it is a closed race for the NCP," said Moawia Ahmed Massa sitting in a dark tea shack in Mandela's market.

A few torn SPLM posters cover the shop hoardings in the dusty market place, but it is hard to find anyone with the telltale green ink on their left index finger, the indelible mark given to voters at polling centers.

"I might vote this tomorrow or this evening, but I'll be working most of the time," said Massa, a surgery administrator who moved to Khartoum from Pibor county in south Sudan's Jonglei state 10 years ago while the last north-south civil war was raging.

"Bukra (tomorrow)," was the regular refrain from other stall holders in the market, when asked when they plan to vote." "I am not going to vote for anyone," said Abu Abeid Moula sitting next to Massa in the tea shack, filled with clouds of smoke rising from an incense burner.

"If they can sort out the housing here before the elections I'll vote. If they can't I won't," said Moula, originally from the Nuba mountains area of South Kordofan state, one of the key battle grounds in the civil conflict.

Analysts have long diagnosed one of the main weaknesses in Sudan's political system as the concentration of power and wealth among the central Khartoum elite, at the expense of surrounding regions and populations.

Deep-felt resentment over central domination and marginalization has helped fueled revolts in the south, the east and most recently in the remote western Darfur. Sudan's two-decade civil war ended in the 2005 peace deal that set up the current elections.

Now the survivors of many of these conflicts, sheltering in mud and brick shacks on the edges of Khartoum, are feeling just as alienated by the running elections process.

Voters queued for hours in the center of Khartoum on the first day of voting, with opposition supporters accusing the NCP of bussing in its supporters in a show of strength.

Two men and a woman slowly went through the voting process in one of the three polling centers in Mandela's Mosab bin Omair school in neighboring Mayo camp just before voting closed on Monday. Staff at the school had registered less than a quarter of their combined 3,419-strong electorate in two days of voting.

Officials quoted similar statistics in two voting centers in Fatima Al-Zahra school in neighboring Mayo camp.

"The turnout is low. But there is a lot of ignorance here.

People do not know a lot about the elections. The voting has been going smoothly," said one official in Mandela.

Outside the market James "Bond" Koch, sits outside his hut in front of a pile of dirty washing. The tall, rake-thin former southern rebel soldier is now in his late 60s and makes his living doing laundry.

"If there was a box on the form for Salva Kiir, I would vote for him," he says. Unfortunately SPLM leader Kiir is running in south Sudan, not Khartoum, for the presidency of just the underdeveloped south. "It's an important election, so maybe I should vote anyway. Maybe tomorrow."