Ramadan Chan Liol, the general secretary of the council, said police forced their way into the council’s offices in Amarat Khartoum on November 14, a Sunday, as 200 men who arrived in seven trucks cordoned off the building.
The churches’ leader said one police officer had said the building was suspected of being a hideaway for weapons. The raid came as Africa’s biggest country is preparing for a plebiscite on January 9 to determine if the north and south will split, Chan noted. ”We met with the police commander who led the forces, but we could not get anything out of him to justify the actions of the officers. He claimed his men had acted in a professional manner in breaking into the building,” Chan told ENInews from Khartoum on November 22, noting that the police did not find anything.
Chan, the general secretary of the body that groups Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic churches, said southern Sudan’s people are at the same time concerned about their votes being manipulated to sway the referendum’s result in favor of unity. Southern Sudan, where the people are mainly black Christians or followers of traditional African religions, will hold a referendum on whether or not it will secede from the northern part of Africa’s biggest country, which is inhabited mainly by Arabs and Muslims.
”I think … there is great need to monitor the registration in Kenya, Uganda, and Egypt very closely less the process is rigged and the problem begins in Sudan again,” Chan had said in Nairobi on November 17. “There are fears among the southerners that Khartoum is out to rig the referendum.”
Registration for the referendum started on November 15 and is expected to end on December 1. The plebiscite was mandated by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in Nairobi in 2005, bringing to an end decades of civil war in which almost 2 million civilians died.
In Kenya, business people, students, and refugees began trickling into five registration centers located in towns and at the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps in the north of the country. But some Sudanese have expressed suspicions and fears that they may be prevented from voting.
“It is advisable that they get proper information before they commit to registration,” said Chan. “The law says unless there are 20,000 people registered in a center, there will be no voting there.”
