What hope there might have been for those who saw Sudan’s upcoming parliamentary elections – the first in that country since 1986 – as a step in the right direction is quickly fading away as the brutality of current President Omar al-Bashir is once again rearing its ugly head. A few weeks before the announcement that the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the leading opposition party to al-Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP), pulled its Presidential candidate from the race, along with several other parties who plan on boycotting all levels of the elections, the Carter Center – currently the only elections monitoring mission in the country – issued a statement cautioning that the election “remains at risk on multiple fronts including the ability of candidates to campaign freely.”
The Carter Center’s prediction appears to be accurate, and most advocacy groups agree. Indeed, Save Darfur is “urging the United States government and the international community not to legitimize Sudan’s presidential election,” calling the election a “flawed and unfair process from the start.” The International Crisis Group is even stronger with its words, stating that the NCP “manipulated the census results and voter registration, drafted the election laws in its favor, gerrymandered electoral districts, co-opted traditional leaders and bought tribal loyalties,” and assuring that “whoever wins will likely lack legitimacy.”
All the more tragic is that, as the ICG notes, while the NCP “has done this all over Sudan,” they have been especially militant about it in Darfur, “where it has had freedom and means to carry out its strategy, since that is the only region still under emergency rule.” The people of Darfur – including 2.7 displaced, many in refugee camps would have had everything to gain from a free and fair election, but once again they have been violently excluded from participating in their country’s decision-making process.
So, as Mia Farrow writes in this op-ed, it is important that the international community “acknowledge the deeply corrupt voting process that will reinstate President Omar al-Bashir,” and declare that he “rule without a genuine democratic mandate.” The State Department has suggested that it would support a brief delay of the elections if it helped conditions, but their proposed postponement of one month would give little time to reverse all of the alarming trends observed until this point (it has since announced that it would back the current schedule). It is up to the international community to make peace in Darfur, and not an illegitimate power grab, the number one priority of the government of Sudan.