President Omar al-Bashir said yesterday that northern Sudan will reinforce its Islamic laws after a January referendum which is expected to grant independence to the south.
“If south Sudan secedes, we’ll change the constitution. There will be no question of cultural or ethnic diversity. Sharia will be the only source of the constitution, and Arabic the only official language,” he said in a speech on national television.
Southerners are set to vote in a referendum on January 9 on whether to remain united with the north or break away and form their own country.
The vote is a key plank of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south that put an end to more than two decades of civil war.
Analysts are predicting that the southerners will opt for independence, and senior officials in Khartoum are even beginning to accept the idea of the split.
An aide to Mr Bashir admitted on Thursday that south Sudan would probably choose secession because efforts aimed at promoting unity had failed.
“After the secession of the south, we could see the north radicalise and the creation of a Muslim caliphate,” one foreign official said on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi will visit Khartoum this week for talks with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the official Suna news agency reported late yesterday.
During their visit tomorrow, the visiting Arab leaders will discuss “current events in the country” and “the importance of relations” among the three neighbouring African countries, Suna said in a short dispatch
After the civil war, Mr Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) and the former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) agreed on an interim constitution valid until July 2011.
The constitution recognises the “multi-ethnic,” “multi-cultural” and “multi-faith” status of the Sudanese state, and is based on both sharia, or Islamic law, and the “consensus” of the population.
It also recognises Arabic and English as the two official languages of Africa’s largest country, which was formerly under British and Egyptian rule.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague yesterday put Sudan and Lebanon into the same bracket as potential areas of renewed conflict in the Arab world.
They were the “two areas in January that are most obvious at this stage to watch for a political crisis or an outbreak of violence,” Mr Hague told Britain’s Sky News television.
“So across the international community we must be ready to do everything we can to assist with those countries,” he said in reference to Sudan’s referendum and a UN-backed investigation into ex-Lebanese Premier Rafiq Hariri’s murder.
Mr Bashir, meanwhile, in a speech punctuated by religious references, defended the way the authorities have dealt with the case of a young woman whose whipping by police appeared in a YouTube video.
A police spokesman said last Tuesday that 46 women and six men had been arrested for holding an illegal demonstration after the video was made public.