At UN, US envoy Rice fears ‘much is awry’ with upcoming election in Sudan

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At UN, US envoy says vote is going ‘awry’ in Sudan

UNITED NATIONS — U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice brushed aside Sudan’s assurances that it will hold fair elections this month, telling reporters Thursday that what she heard about the situation at a U.N. Security Council briefing was troubling.

“Unfortunately, the trends on the ground are very disturbing,” Rice said after a closed-door briefing by U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy on Sudan’s first multiparty elections in more than two decades, set to begin on April 11. “The larger picture is that much is awry in this process, and that is a real concern.”

Rice said the United States would favor delaying the vote, particularly after the European Union’s decision, announced Wednesday, to withdraw its election observers from Sudan, whose fate poses a risk to the stability of the broader East Africa region.

She had requested the report by Le Roy after former Sudanese Prime Minister Sadig al Mahdi’s Umma party announced it will boycott the election. Several of Sudan’s biggest opposition parties have withdrawn from the race.

“There have been some significant impediments on the ground, restrictions on civil liberties, harassment of the media, reduction in the number of polling places, insecurity, an inability of many of the people, particularly in Darfur, to be able to register and participate,” she said. “If a very brief delay were decided to be necessary, and we thought that a brief delay would enable the process to be more credible, we would be prepared to entertain that.”

Rice said Le Roy reinforced the United States’ long-standing concerns about the elections. That contrasts with U.S. President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, who said five days ago the assurances he got from Sudan’s election commission have given him “confidence that the election will start on time and that they will be as free and that they well be as fair as possible.”

Le Roy told reporters it will be up to the 18,000 Sudanese and 750 international election observers to assess the results, since the U.N. is only providing technical help as mandated by the Security Council.

The turmoil over Sudan’s elections stems from allegations of government violations and opposition threats of a boycott, dampening hopes the conflict-plagued nation can avoid more violence in Darfur and the south.

Sudan’s Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamed, who has vehemently defended the president, Omar al-Bashir, promised the elections would serve as a real turning point in his nation, after 50 years of civil war between north and south that killed 2 million people.

He predicted that the elections will be “fair, transparent and successful” despite repeated military coups and years of violence in Darfur that have claimed an estimated 300,000 lives and brought international war crimes charges against al-Bashir.

“We have no electoral crisis at all,” he said. “We may have some crisis within some political parties.”

A U.S.-backed peace treaty in 2005 ended the north-south war, setting in motion both the elections this month and a key vote next year on a referendum that could grant independence to the southern oil-rich and mainly Christian and animist region. Sudan is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest oil producer.

Fears are rising any such move could lead to more violence with the predominantly Muslim north that has ruled for decades. The separate conflict in Darfur erupted in 2003, when ethnic African tribes rose up complaining of discrimination by the Arab-led government in Khartoum.