SUDAN CALLS FOR WORLD TO MONITOR REFERENDUM

Sudan on September 27 urged the international community to support and monitor the referendum on the independence of the south of the country that may split Africa’s largest nation in two. The January 9 vote must be held “without any coercion or diktat and in an atmosphere of integrity and transparency,” Vice President Ali Osman Taha told the annual summit of world leaders at the United Nations. A 2005 peace agreement that ended a bloody 21-year civil war between Sudan’s mostly Muslim north and predominantly animist and Christian south set up the unity government in the capital, Khartoum, as well as an autonomous government in the south. It called for the 2011 referendum on southern independence. Sudanese officials have repeatedly appealed to the international community to help maintain peace as they near the critical ballot on January 9. “We will try to our best that unity will be the voluntary choice of the choice of the citizens of South Sudan,” Taha said.