Voting in the weeklong referendum began Sunday with jubilant celebrations, and most everyone agrees the vote will result in the south splitting off from the Khartoum-based north. The two sides ended a 23-year civil war in 2005 that killed some 2 million people. The peace deal called for this week's vote.
Mahmud Abubakar waited in line to vote twice. On Sunday, he said, he got in line at 8 a.m. but abandoned the queue at 1 p.m. still far from the ballot box. On Monday he got in line at 7 a.m. and cast his ballot four hours later in between ancient-looking lab tables at Juba University. He said he didn't mind waiting.
"We have suffered long enough. We want separation," Abubaker, 31, said.
Juma Salah, the head of the electoral workers at the university, said lines were much shorter Monday despite the four-hour wait. Still, two queues snaked around the chemistry building.
Southerners, who mainly define themselves as African, have long resented their underdevelopment, accusing the northern Arab-dominated government of taking their oil revenues without investing in the south.
"I'm black," voter Jenaro Kwajok Pierssio said while pinching his skin. "No unity."
Almost everyone -- including Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir,
Head of the National Congress Party. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and eventually appointed himself president. Omar's peculiar talent lies in starting conflict. He has fallen out with his Islamic mentor, Hasan al-Turabi, tried to impose shariah on the Christian and animist south, resulting in its imminent secessesion, and attempted to
ArabizeDarfur by unleashing the barbaric Janjaweed on it. Sudan's potential prosperity has been pissed away in warfare that has left as many as 400,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. Omar has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court but nothing is expected to come of it.
who has been indicted for war crimes in the western Sudan region of Darfur -- agrees that the mainly Christian south will secede from the mainly Mohammedan north.