Sudan paves way for vote by approving electoral law
KHARTOUM (AFP) — Sudan's parliament on Monday approved a new electoral law, a crucial step toward scheduled national elections and a democratic transition laid out in peace arrangements after a 21-year civil war.
For the first time in Sudan, the law grants women 25 percent of seats in the national assembly and introduces proportional representation into the biggest country in Africa by enshrining quotas for political parties.
The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed by north and south after a devastating two-decade civil war, calls for elections no later than 2009, although efforts to implement the accord have hit major delays.
Under the timetable of the accord, the electoral legislation should have been in place by January 2006, making the law two and a half years late.
After long-drawn out political negotiations, members of parliament finally carried the bill on Monday with 350 votes to 14 objections and two abstentions, said state news agency SUNA.
In keeping with the new law, 60 percent of MPs will be elected directly by voters in local constituencies.
Electoral lists will then guarantee women 112 seats, in other words 25 percent of the 450-member parliament, and grant political parties 15 percent.
Sudan is supposed to appoint an electoral commission within a month of the law's enactment. Significant delays would make the prospect of elections next year increasingly unlikely.
Under the interim national constitution, set up after the 2005 peace agreement, all current MPs are appointed.
President Omar al-Beshir's National Congress Party (NCP) occupies 52 percent of seats and his former southern foes, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement which joined national government as part of the peace deal, holds 28 percent.
Other political groups, including representatives from conflict-strewn Darfur who signed a 2006 peace deal with the Khartoum government in Nigeria, account for 20 percent.
Beshir seized power in a 1989 Islamist-backed coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government. He won a new five-year term as president during Sudan's last national election in December 2000.
Those elections were boycotted by the opposition and Beshir was first declared elected president in a 1996 poll widely denounced as fraudulent.
Complete democratic transformation in Sudan would also require major legal reform elsewhere, such as media and national security legislation.
Ghazi Salah Eddin, the head of the NCP bloc in parliament, welcomed the new electoral law for benefitting women and said the introduction of proportional representation would grant a parliamentary voice to vulnerable areas.
The SPLM said it backed the law to facilitate elections on schedule, but criticised the gender segregation on the electoral lists and voiced concern for future peace in Sudan if Darfur and the east are marginalised.
"If they are not represented in the coming political set up then they will look for other means like armed struggle, which is the situation we should avoid," Yasser Arman, SPLM deputy secretary general, told AFP.
"Without the Darfur case settled fairly it is difficult to envisage having a fair and democratic election," he said.
The United Nations says five years of war, famine and disease in Darfur may have killed up to 300,000 people. Khartoum says 10,000 have been killed.
Arman said that appointing a neutral electoral commission was key "to have a fair election so as not to repeat the example of Kenya and Zimbabwe".
Ismail Abash, a Darfuri MP, also voiced concern that the 40 percent quotas discriminated against western and eastern Sudan.
Monday's law enfranchises all Sudanese citizens over the age of 18. Candidates for election must be over the age of 40 and have no criminal record.
Independent candidates need the signatures of at least 100 local supporters.
