Word: khartoum
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...International Response Sudan has been a pariah state since 1989 when Omar al-Bashir seized power and introduced a harsh brand of militant Islamism. In 1998, President Bill Clinton bombed a factory in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in retaliation for al-Qaeda's bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Six years later, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared Khartoum was perpetrating a genocide in the western region of Darfur. This was not a case of U.S. unilateralism; it was backed internationally in 2009 when the International Criminal Court in the Hague indicted Bashir on seven counts...
...upside-down world of Sudanese politics, it was the party that fought hardest for democracy that pulled the plug on the country's moment of "democratic transformation": the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), which led the south in a decades-long struggle against the regime in Khartoum, was the first to withdraw from the election, eliminating the candidacy of Yasir Arman, the man seen as able to present the strongest challenge to al-Bashir. Sudan's ruler of 20 years, who last year became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court...
...Reactions in some quarters have been harsh. The U.S.-based anti-Khartoum advocacy movement accused the U.S. of endorsing a "sham" election. The ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, likened the task facing foreign observer teams to "monitoring a Hitler election." Amid such criticism, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, Major General Scott Gration, headed to Sudan to try to salvage the sinking electoral ship but ended up only enraging al-Bashir's northern opposition by expressing his confidence that the vote would be as "free and fair as possible." John Ashworth, a veteran of 27 years in Sudan...
...Holding the election was required by the U.S.-brokered 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended the second of two long civil wars between the country's north and south. That conflict was the longest running of several between the Arab, Islamist government in Khartoum, which has lavished resources on itself and its capital city, and separatist groups across Sudan's periphery, which have been marginalized for decades. (See how the election can spark peace in Darfur...
...Sudan's other great unresolved conflict - between Khartoum and the south of the country - another kind of election, a referendum, on whether to secede from the north, is due next year. The north and the south have fought two wars in the last half-century that have killed 2 million people, and an overwhelming majority of southerners are expected to opt for their own independent state. The approaching reality of that separation seems to have persuaded Sudan to accept what previously provoked them into war. Last month, Bashir announced that if the south did vote...