Sudan's elections roller coaster

The last 24 hours have proven to be the most stressful since the Al Jazeera crew arrived in Khartoum to cover the multi-party elections scheduled on April 11.

We and other media outlets were invited to a press conference at the National Elections Commission [NEC] headquarters on Tuesday.

As we arrived we were told that Scott Gration, the US special envoy to Sudan had just left. We waited in the blistering sun for over an hour before Al-Hadi Mohammed Ahmed, member of the NEC announced that the elections will go ahead as scheduled.

I couldn't help but think that in this roller coaster of an election, Ahmed's announcement should come as some relief for the nearly 16 million eligible voters.

We later headed to the headquarters of the National Umma Party, an opposition party, where all the top leaders were meeting to discuss whether they would withdraw their participation in the elections or stay the course.

Last week, they had said they would pull out unless the government met eight key demands.

The atmosphere at the headquarters resembled that of a festival of journalists, everyone gathered outside in the garden in the dark until they turned on some lights; and we waited.

And waited.

Then word came that the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) had met as we were waiting and decided to withdraw from legislative, local and presidential polls in the north.

They claimed the same voting irregularities they used when they withdrew their presidential candidate Yasir Arman from the elections.

The SPLM are Southern Sudan's main political party and among Omar al-Bashir's fiercest critics.

Everyone was stunned and our Sudanese journalist friends were in disbelief; the SPLM's move was not expected especially four days before the elections were supposed to begin.

As the political wrangling in Sudan gets more and more complicated, we will see who will drop, who will stay and who will split. I couldn't help wondering whether this could have been a sign of a split within the SPLM party.

The turn of events started when Arman, a Muslim candidate for the presidency for the predominantly Christian SPLM, was asked by party echelons to withdraw his bid last week.

Arman apparently had been expecting the party to boycott the elections as a whole and form an alliance with the opposition but he was surprised when Salva Kiir, the president of the autonomous South, asked him to withdraw from the elections.

Durra Gambo, a Sudanese journalist, believes the SPLM's decision could lead to speculation whether there are divisions within the party.

She explained that there are two forces within the party: Pagan Amum, the SPLM party chairman, is for unity with the North on the condition that the rights and needs of the South are met. He feels that the South has always been fighting for freedom and equality but that it should gain these through legal and peaceful means.

"The other force does not want unity because they don't feel that the North will ever offer freedom and equality for the south, there is a long way to go, this is not over we will probably see more changes in structure and alliances," Gambo said.

"This shows that there is a clear split within the party and that they have given up on unity before the referendum has even been held," she said.

Fatma, another journalist who had also come to the Umma party headquarters to await their announcement, said: " I am shocked, this decision will have some dire consequences and the outcome of the Umma meeting will also determine where we will head to from here, but it sure does leave the country and the elections in a very dark and uncertain place."

After five hours of waiting for the Umma meeting to conclude, we were surprised when the party members boisterously rushed out, apparently having failed to reach a clear result; as the doors opened some female members were shouting at the guards "open the doors! Open them now".

A member that did not want to disclose her name said: "This is unacceptable ... they kept us in there for so long, and he [Sadiq al-Mahdi] concluded the meeting when someone handed him a mobile phone and he claimed that he had to take the call and meeting should resume tomorrow."

It seemed that some Umma members felt their voices had still not been heard and wanted to adjourn their meeting to the next day.

I looked at Gambo who was shaking her head. "This is quiet unsettling for the Sudanese people," she said.

"It is disturbing, complicated and confusing."