Word: jubas
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...southern Sudan become an independent nation when it possesses so little of what defines one? Many aid workers and development experts in Juba doubt it can. They have coined a new term to describe its unique status: pre-failed state. In public, the international community tries to be more upbeat. But optimism is hard with so little time to prepare for separation. Southerners are expected overwhelmingly to choose to split Africa's largest country at a referendum on independence next Jan. 9, and David Gressly, the U.N.'s regional coordinator for southern Sudan, admits, "There is a lot of discussion...
...thousand miles from anywhere, among the empty flatlands and bare rock hills that mark the Sahara's southern edge, Juba is a place of mud huts and plastic-bag roofs where buzzards lift lazily on the afternoon heat and children wash in the muddy waters of the White Nile. It has no landline telephones, no public transport, no power grid, no industry, no agriculture and precious few buildings: hotels, aid compounds and even some government ministries are built from prefab cabins and shipping containers. There are a few businesses, a few score police, a handful of schools, one run-down...
...ready when it got independence," notes Carter. Gressly argues South Sudan doesn't have to be fully formed at first, particularly if the global mission to build it continues, as he expects, for "10 to 15 to 20 years." And despite the World Bank holdup, there is progress. Juba may not look like much, but at least it looks like something. "There used to be nothing," says Itto. Some point to the Carter Center's spectacular recent advances in its fight against Guinea worm, a potentially lethal parasite carried by water, as proof, as Carter says, "that success is possible...
...represents a vital first step on what promises to be a fraught road. "Without this election, there is no way to go forward to the referendum and the culmination of the peace agreement," former U.S. President Jimmy Carter told TIME while monitoring the voting in South Sudan's capital, Juba. "I'm not predicting tragedy, but I don't have much doubt that if the entire CPA has to be abandoned, there will be conflicts re-emerging in this country...
...choice did not always play well on South Sudan's streets. "Many people in the south wanted to vote for Yasir," says Moses Duku, a Juba motorbike taxi driver. "Who are we to vote for now?" But with prospects dimming for the realization of the CPA's vision of a new, united Sudan, many in the south are looking to the peace deal's final exit clause. "It's clearly mentioned in the CPA that you need the elections to happen," says Edmin Baba after casting his first ever vote. But, he adds, "the referendum, of course, for every southerner...