UK Elections Observers Deploy To Help Sudan Move Towards Democracy

29 March 2010 - (Khartoum) – the UK-based Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis, says it will deploy fifty election observers in south Sudan as part of the international community’s mission to observe Sudan’s general elections scheduled for April this year.

Speaking to the press in Khartoum on Saturday, the Director of the CFPA, Prof. Paul Moorcraft, emphasized that the observers are independent.

[Paul Moorcraft]: “We have fifty observers in the group. They come from a wide range of professions in the United Kingdom. We are independent; we are not aligned to government, although some of the people in the team have a military background or government background or academic background, they are here as neutral, absolutely neutral observers, independent, not tied to any government or creed or philosophy. Fifty people, many of them are lawyers, constitutional lawyers, some of them are eminent professors and some of them have been most of the time in observation recently. So we put together a very experienced varied team who speak Arabic. We tried to put together a team that will understand this country.”

Prof. Moorcraft said the CFPA wanted to help the Sudan move towards real democracy.

[Paul Moorcraft]: “In the final report which we will make, we will put our observations down and if there are some things that we think in our opinion could perhaps in terms of procedures be done better, we would make some suggestions as a way of perhaps trying to help. We are here simply to observe and this is a major operation. So we are here to look at the transition from your previous systems to a multi-party democracy. We are here to help but not to interfere. We are here to see what went right and perhaps one or two things that went wrong and we will record it as honestly and faithfully as we can. That is what we are here to do. We are here to help Sudan.”

Moorcraft described the recent statement by President Omar al-Bashir that he would expel foreign observers if they continue to call for the postponement of the elections as a “threat”.

According to him, the CFPA was invited by the National Elections Commission to assist with the observation of Sudan’s general elections in April.