The Sudanese are voting this weekend in their first democratic elections in the past quarter century. The voters are electing their next president and the members of the National Assembly. There are elections for the regional government in southern Sudan as well. All of this is happening as a result of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
Matthew Davies, writing for the Episcopal News Service, provides the background to the elections, the role that church groups have played in Sudan and what the implications might be.
“There has been a ratcheting up of interest in Sudan because people are making dire predictions about the election aftermath,” Parkins, director of the American Friends of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, told ENS in a telephone interview. “It’s not addressing new issues but putting a spotlight on the fragility of the peace agreement.”
Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in January 2005 by the two warring parties — the Government of Sudan in the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in the south — bringing an end to a 20-year civil war that claimed more than 2 million lives and displaced about 7 million people.
Among the major terms of the agreement are the equitable distribution of oil revenues, drawing of fair borders, and the development of democratic governance throughout the country. But the northern government’s failure to live into these terms and a recent increase in violence have threatened to undermine the election, with major boycotts feared.
The peace agreement also set the date of 2011 for a special referendum in which southerners can vote whether to secede from the north or remain a unified country.
The full article is here – and is well worth the time to read all the way through.