JUBA, Sudan Oct 7 (Reuters) – South Sudan’s president told U.N. Security Council envoys his region might have to hold its own independence referendum if the north disrupted next year’s vote, a visiting U.N. ambassador said, a move that would enrage Khartoum.
Southerners are about three months away from a referendum on whether they should form Africa’s newest country or stay united with the north, their foes in a decades-long civil war that ended in 2005.
“He (Southern president Salva Kiir) was not going to declare UDI (a unilateral declaration of independence),” Britain’s Security Council ambassador Mark Lyall Grant told reporters, describing what Kiir told envoys during a meeting on Wednesday.
“But if there is a delay, a politically induced delay by the NCP (the north’s dominant National Congress Party) for the referendum, then it might be necessary for the south to hold their own referendum,” he said. (Reporting by Louis Charbonneau, writing by Andrew Heavens; Editing by Jon Boyle)