99% in Sudan vote for split

SOUTHERN Sudan’s referendum commission said yesterday that more than 99% of voters in the south opted to secede from the country’s north in a vote held earlier this month.

The announcement drew cheers from a crowd of thousands that gathered in Juba, the dusty capital of what may become the world’s newest country.

The weeklong vote, held in early January and widely praised for being peaceful and for meeting international standards, was a condition of a peace agreement that ended a north-south civil war that lasted two decades and killed two million people.