KHARTOUM, 10 June 2003 — The Sudanese government has proposed the holding of a nationwide referendum and general elections once a peace settlement is reached with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), a senior official said in remarks published yesterday. A referendum “would ensure a national consensus” on such an agreement, presidential peace adviser Ghazi Salah Eddin Atabani told Al-Anbaa newspaper after talks Sunday with Kenya’s chief peace mediator Gen. Lazaro Sumbeiywo.
Sumbeiywo said he expects an agreement to be reached in August that would end a 20-year civil war between Khartoum and the rebels. “We also demand the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections on the heels of the referendum, that is, during the first year of the (six-year) transitional period,” Atabani was quoted as saying. Sudan last held multiparty elections 17 years ago.
Elections would “show the actual, rather than the historical weights of the political parties”, he said, challenging the opposition Umma and Democratic Unionist parties which beat the National Islamic Front in 1986. The Islamist-dominated ruling National Congress emerged from the NIF, which backed Gen. Omar Al-Bashir in a military coup in 1989. Even though such a meeting had been expected during his six-day visit here, Sumbeiywo did not meet Bashir.
Meanwhile, a pro-government Islamist organization has called for a mass protest next week against opposition calls to scrap Islamic Shariah laws in Khartoum, an official report said yesterday. The Popular Organization for the Defense of the Faith and Homeland, decided late Sunday to organize the demonstration for next Monday and expects about a million people to attend, Al-Anbaa said.
The group charged that the SPLA, and the opposition Umma and Democratic Unionist Parties (DUP) have violated a peace plan struck in Kenya last year by calling for Khartoum to be turned into a secular capital.
