On the topic of southern Sudanese secession, a group of students met Thursday night to discuss the upcoming referendum in the African nation with four Sudan Good Governance Fellows who are visiting Northwestern this spring.
The event was part of the Undergraduate Africa Seminar program, a series of informal gatherings started earlier this year in which students come together “about every other week to talk about Africa, particularly political issues,” said UAS student coordinator Case Martin, a Weinberg senior. It was held in the Department of African Studies building at 620 Library Place.
The fellows are participating in a five-week Sudan Good Governance Fellowship Program, a “capacity-building program” in which they audit courses at NU.
The purpose of the program is to allow the fellows to take what they learn and apply it to the political situation of the South Kordofan state, the Weinberg senior said.
A recent article from the Sudan Tribune, which Martin e-mailed to students in attendance before the seminar, states the 2011 Secession Referendum is a “key requirement” of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the last Sudanese civil war. Since gaining independence from the United Kingdom in 1956, Sudan has been mostly “embroiled in two prolonged civil wars” between the predominantly Arab Muslim north, which dominates the country, and the mostly African Christian and animist south, according to the CIA World Factbook.
“There is the problem still today that the north wants an Arab, Islamic country in spite of the diversity in the country,” said Neroun Phillip Ajo Kuku, one of the Sudanese fellows. The peace agreement granted political autonomy to the south for six years, ending in 2011, when the south will vote to become part of a unified Sudan or secede. Martin asked the fellows to speak to the students about this upcoming referendum, how it affects their region, what will happen in Sudan in the next few months and what needs to happen for the referendum to be carried out peacefully.
According to the Sudan Tribune article, there has been speculation in Sudan that northern Sudanese rulers will try to delay the referendum, since many expect the southern Sudanese will vote in favor of secession.
Kuku said there has been “no official decision to delay the referendum to date.” Siddig Mansour Elnair, another fellow, said they hope it will be free and fair, but they expect the government will “not make it easy.”
“We hope that things will go smoothly,” he said. “We don’t want to go back to war.”
The fellows are all political leaders from South Kordofan, a state in the center of Sudan which The Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies website describes as a “marginalized, contested region.” They are also members of the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement, the southern-based political party that signed the peace agreement with the Sudanese government.
Fellow Tia Tutu Tutu Kafi explained the agreement divided the country in two and said the specific problem for the South Kordofan state, as well as other central Sudanese states, is they are located in a “transitional area” of the country.
According to New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, people in these regions likely would favor joining the south if it secedes. However, the agreement indicates they will remain part of the north, so secession could reignite conflict in these areas.
Elnair said when the fellows visit Washington they will try to prompt the international community to intervene on the issue of the referendum and especially its effects on marginalized regions like theirs.
“We need very strongly the intervention of the international community,” he said. “We are trying to go for that when we go to Washington, D.C.”
