Too Late to Deter Violence Over Sudan Election Results

The collective sigh of relief over the relative lack of violence during Sudan's national elections may have been premature. Local violence over the announcement of provincial results could be a sign of worse to come, especially as many opposition parties have vowed to reject the pending announcement that President Omar al-Bashir has won re-election. What this will mean for the announcement, which could come tomorrow, and the days, weeks, and months after is anybody's guess.

Local eruptions of protest and violence may be small in scale, but should be taken seriously by all stakeholders in Sudan's peace process. Small incidents of violence have a way of snowballing quite quickly into something far more ugly, and tensions in Africa's largest country have been mounting for months. The sad this is, however, that despite warnings of the imminent possibility of large-scale violence in Sudan, little seems to have been done to deter such a scenario. At this point, there's not much anyone can do but sit, wait, and hope for the best.

That hope is, of course, that despite the enormous challenges facing Sudan, and the categorically unfair elections that systematically prevented Sudanese voters from open and free participation in deciding the future of their country, the announcement of election results will not spark more widespread violence. Hope and faith are generally not the best tools of a mass violence prevention policy, but they might be all we have left.

Photo credit: UN Photo/Albert Gonzalez Farran