KHARTOUM (Reuters) – The people of Sudan’s Darfur have voted not to reunite the states of the conflict-torn region, the commission overseeing a referendum said yesterday, but opposition groups said the poll was rigged by the central government in Khartoum.
The government split the western region into three states in 1994, and then later into five states, following years of fighting in which mainly non-Arab tribes took up arms against what they said was discrimination by the Arab-led administration.
Major rebel and opposition groups, who boycotted the government-arranged referendum, believe the splitting up of the region led to heavier Khartoum control and helped trigger renewed fighting in 2003.
But the state referendum commission said yesterday that 97 per cent of voters chose to continue with the multi-state administrative system and that 3.08 million people of a total 3.21 million eligible voters had turned out, figures that opposition groups said were fraudulent.
“These results reflect the fraud the Sudanese government continues to employ in all of its elections. It’s the falsification of the will of the masses,” said Jibril Bilal, a spokesman for the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of Darfur’s two main rebel groups.
“These results are not real nor logical. We don’t acknowledge the referendum, which most of Darfur boycotted,” he added.
According to the United Nations, some 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur since the conflict first began, while 4.4 million people need aid and more than 2.5 million have been displaced.
