By embarking only on a partial boycott (withdrawing its presidential candidate and pulling out of regional elections in Darfur only), the SPLM is playing a two-level game. On one level, it hedges its Darfurian support by declaring solidarity with the position of insurgents there. A fair election is impossible amidst prevailing political roadblocks. Withdrawal of European election monitors from the region this week was a belated acknowledgement by the EU of this sad reality. At another level, SPLM's partial boycott stops short of the outright provocation that would hand Al-Bashir and his supporters an excuse to complicate the south's independence bid.
The US, like the EU, wants the elections to go ahead. But Washington's Sudan strategy is even more dependent on the NCP-SPLM accommodation. America has invested huge political capital in the North-South agreement, and sees the conduct of this month's elections as central to actualising the CPA. The US tolerates a narrow elite accommodation in the hope that it gives South Sudan a final say on its own future and helps transform the drawn-out North-South conflict. It is a seductive but deeply flawed strategy in view of numerous unresolved questions, many of them vital to a successful southern referendum: internal border demarcation and oil revenue allocations, tensions over Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, and continuing borderland conflicts fuelled by Al-Bashir's ethnic militarisation strategies.
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