Southern Sudan leader pledges peaceful split from north



Addis Ababa, Jan 31 (DPA) The leader of what will become the world's newest state this year, Southern Sudan, Monday promised a peaceful transition to independence after results showed voters had overwhelmingly chosen to split from the north.

Salva Kiir, addressing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir at a meeting on the sidelines of an African Union summit, said the south had no desire to return to 'the bitterness and divisions of the past'.

'Today, the ballot box has triumphed over the bullet,' he said. 'It is our most sincere wish to achieve peaceful coexistence between north and south, to enable all of our peoples to live in security and prosperity.'

Official preliminary results released Sunday showed 98.83 percent of almost 4 million voters had opted to secede from Sudan in a January referendum.

The vote was enshrined in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war between the mainly Muslim north and Christian and Animist south.

More than 2 million southerners died and 4 million were displaced in Sudan's 1983-2005 north-south civil war, which was essentially a continuation of the 1955-72 conflict that followed independence from joint British and Egyptian rule.

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