JUBA – South Sudan leaders warned against premature independence celebrations on Tuesday as the slow process of collating the result of last week’s vote ground on amid indications of a landslide. Information minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin said that any triumphalism about the separation of the mainly Christian, African south from the mainly Arab, Muslim north risked sparking a “miscarriage” for their nascent state.
“The opinion polls indicate that the south will definitely vote for a state of their own but we must still wait for the final result,” the minister said. “Don’t dance and beat drums and celebrate before the baby is born in case there may be a miscarriage.” Benjamin called on southerners to be particularly careful about any crowing in front of northerners still in the south, nearly all of whom were excluded from voting in the referendum by the registration criteria.
“The north Sudanese who are here, these people are here to stay. They have the right as much as you (have) as citizens of Sudan,” he said. Some northern traders and long-term residents remain in the south, along with key technical staff in the region’s oil fields, which account for 80 percent of Sudan’s reserves. But they number far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of southerners in the north. The south’s ruling party — the former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) — has been careful to observe the niceties of the count and not claim victory too soon, as it has basked in foreign poll observers’ endorsement of the credibility of the vote
