South Sudan's 2011 Referendum and the End of a 22-Year War

Sudan’s Second Civil War pitted the Khartoum government against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement, based in the country’s south, in a conflict that ran from 1983 to 2005 and killed an estimated two million people through combat, famine, and disease, one of the deadliest wars fought anywhere since the Second World War, alongside displacing more than four million more. The war finally ended with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in Nairobi in January 2005, which granted southern Sudan six years of autonomy under a unity government and, critically, guaranteed the south a referendum on full independence at the end of that period.

John Garang, the SPLM leader who had negotiated the agreement and who took office as First Vice President of Sudan and president of the newly autonomous Government of Southern Sudan, died on July 30, 2005, six years before the referendum he had secured, when a Ugandan presidential helicopter carrying him back from a meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni crashed in bad weather in the mountains of southern Sudan, killing him along with six associates and seven Ugandan crew members. His death triggered several days of deadly rioting in Khartoum and elsewhere, in which at least 130 people were killed amid fears the peace agreement itself might collapse. It held, and Garang’s deputy, Salva Kiir Mayardit, took over leadership of both the SPLM and the south’s autonomous government.

The referendum Garang had negotiated for finally took place from January 9 to 15, 2011, with more than 3.85 million registered voters and turnout of 97.58 percent. The result left little ambiguity about southern Sudan’s preference after decades of war: 98.83 percent voted for secession, with every one of the south’s ten states recording support above 99 percent. South Sudan formally became an independent country on July 9, 2011, with Salva Kiir sworn in as its first president. The optimism of that moment did not hold for long; barely two and a half years later, in December 2013, a power struggle within South Sudan’s own leadership erupted into a new civil war, a grim reminder that a vote for independence had settled the question of secession from Sudan without resolving the deeper political fractures inside the country the vote had just created.