Southern Sudanese Community In Kampala To Boycott Registration

15 November 2010 – (Kampala) – The southern Sudanese community in the neighboring Uganda has boycotted the voter registration exercise.

Mike Panom, the referendum coordinator at the GOSS Liaison Office in Kampala says that the community is contesting the International Organization for Migration’s move to deploy non-southern Sudanese as registrars.

He spoke to SRS by phone from Kampala on Saturday.

[Mike Panom]: “We told them (IOM) that we need southern Sudanese people who speak their own languages, we are doing that simply to avoid errors that appear when names are misspelled and when you come back during voting, you find that your names are different from what is on the registration book. So we need people who speak the local languages who can write very well. That did not go well with them. It is at large that they came with different staffs who are not southern Sudanese. They might be from the north or other part of the world, especially the Middle East, Afghanistan, and maybe Egypt. So, that did not go well with the community here.”

Mike Panom, the referendum coordinator at the GOSS Liaison Office in Kampala spoke to SRS on Saturday.