Bashir wins presidential election

At a news conference broadcast live by Sudan state television and Omdurman radio on 29 December, monitored by the BBC, the chairman of the General Electoral Commission (GEC), Abd al-Mun’im al-Zayn al-Nahhas, declared the incumbent president and candidate of the National Congress party, Lt-Gen Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, the winner of the presidential election. Nahhas said Bashir had received 86.5 percent of the vote, with his nearest rival, former President Ja’far Muhammad Numayri, taking 9.6 percent of the vote. The GEC chairman said about 8,153,372 people had participated in the polls through 50,000 voting centres. Meanwhile, the nine-member observer team from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), led by Ambassador Pascal Gayama, has praised the manner in which the elections were conducted. In a statement released in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on 29 December, and carried by the Sudanese News Agency (SUNA), the team said that, “having observed the elections in various parts of the country”, it wished “to commend the GEC for the arrangements that allowed the Sudanese people, including those outside the country, to freely exercise their democratic rights”. In this respect, the team also wished “to congratulate the Sudanese people in general for their maturity, patience and the disciplined manner which they manifested throughout the process”. The team noted, however, that in a country of about 30 million people, “it was inevitable that there would be some logistical challenges”, which it hoped “will be overcome in future elections”. Noting that “some major political parties had boycotted the elections”, it said that nonetheless “it was encouraging that the leaders from all sides expressed their readiness and commitment to embark, after the elections, on a dialogue”, which would “hopefully bring about national reconciliation”. To sum up, the OAU team expressed the view “that the overall exercise was an important step towards democratisation and that it was conducted in a conducive atmosphere and in a satisfactory manner”. Asked to comment on the election results, the spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in Nairobi, Samson Kwaje, told IRIN: “We don’t accept the results of the election.” He said this was because no elections had taken place “in the 42 percent of the country under the control of the SPLM/A” and that throughout the rest of the country “only 20 percent of the voters participated in the elections because supporters of the main opposition parties [such as the Ummah Party and the Democratic Unionist Party] were told by their party leaders to boycott them”. Kwaje also said it was clear to the SPLM/A that the results had been “heavily rigged in favour of Bashir”.