JUBA, Sudan — It’s not every day that a beleaguered, marginalized and persecuted people get a chance to vote for their own freedom. On Sunday, southern Sudanese did.
Starting in the cool hours of the night, long before the polls even opened, people across this region began lining up at polling stations to cast their votes in a historic referendum on whether to declare independence. Jubilant crowds made clear which was the overwhelmingly popular choice.
“I feel like I’m going to a new land,” beamed Susan Duku, a southern Sudanese woman who works for the United Nations.
As the sun cleared the horizon and the voting began, the streets of Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, broke into a street party. Women were literally skipping around the polls. Young men thumped on drums. Others were wrapped in flags.
On Monday, voting in the weeklong ballot continued as reports began to emerge from the Abyei region near the border with northern Sudan of fighting between northern and southern forces in an area considered a likely flashpoint before, during and after the vote. At least 23 people died in three days of clashes, Reuters reported, quoting leaders aligned with the southern authorities.
In Juba, though, things stayed peaceful — rowdy, but peaceful on Sunday. One man, who clearly had been celebrating with fortified beverages the night before, staggered around a polling station blowing an instrument fashioned from a cow’s horn and rubber tubing.
People were hollering, singing, hugging, kissing, smacking high-fives and dancing as if they never wanted the day to end, despite the sun beating down and voting lines that snaked for blocks.
Southern Sudan has suffered a lot, and after years of civil war, oppression and displacement, many people here saw the vote as an unprecedented chance at self-determination. The referendum ballot offered two choices, unity with northern Sudan or secession. Unity was represented on the ballot by a drawing of two clasped hands. Secession was a single open hand. Many people rely on these symbols: more than three-quarters of southern Sudanese adults cannot read. >>> Jeffrey Gettleman (Josh Kron contributed reporting) | Monday, January 10, 2011
