In a rare spot of good news to come out of Sudan’s elections, it appears the former rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement have won the governorship of Blue Nile state. That is to say, the southern rebels, competing in a rigged election, were victorious in a northern state .

It’s the SPLM that’s made the announcement, [Update: It’s now official.] declaring that the National Election Commission has called the race for their candidate, Malik Agar. If this holds up – if the NEC, which has proved itself to be an extension of the ruling National Congress Party, publicly declares Malik Agar the winner – it will stand as the greatest reversal of what has proven to be a multi-multi-million-dollar sham election.

Blue Nile may be the only state in Sudan to have run something like a fair election. But there was no guarantee it would turn out that way.

According to people following the events, shortly after five days of nationwide voting ended on Thursday, Vice President Ali Osman Taha telephoned the southern leader, Salva Kiir, to inform him that, according to Sudanese intelligence, Agar had lost in Blue Nile. “Cool him down,” was Taha’s message to Salva.

Agar did not cool down. He asked, reasonably, how intelligence or anyone else could know the outcome of an election whose votes had yet to be counted. Taha responded by offering Agar a cabinet post if he would concede and stay quiet. Agar replied, in essence, “Fuck you, I’m winning.”

There followed that weekend a flurry of phone calls between Khartoum, the southern capital of Juba and Blue Nile and, on Monday, when Agar still hadn’t agreed to concede an election whose votes had still not been fully counted, troops began to fill the streets of Damazein, the state capital.

There were other hitches. A local election official refused to allow some ballot boxes under his control to be switched with boxes stuffed by the NCP, something that might only have been possible in Blue Nile, where the SPLM maintained a presence for much of the civil war.

On Tuesday Salva threatened a return to armed conflict if Agar was robbed of his election. The southern party, which is the NCP’s junior partner in the so-called Government of National Unity in Khartoum, was unbothered by widespread rigging elsewhere in the north (in fact they’ve joined the NCP in endorsing those unannounced and surely illegitimate results), but Blue Nile is different.

Blue Nile is a border state – twice a border state, really, wedged between Sudan’s semi-autonomous south to and, to the east, Ethiopia. The southern rebels occupied part of Blue Nile during Sudan’s 21-year civil war, and some people think it was the southern army’s proximity to the Roseires dam, at the time the north’s main source of hydroelectric power, that helped push Khartoum into peace negotiations. Had the rebels blown the dam, the Islamist regime of President Omar al-Bashir would have fallen.

Blue Nile (and Southern Kordofan, too) has special status under the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, an acknowledgement of the affinity that many residents there have for the south and the SPLM. When the south votes next January in a referendum to secede from Sudan, the people of Blue Nile will take part in a non-binding vote that is intended as a first step to limited autonomy within the north.

When the rest of the SPLM’s northern wing decided three weeks ago to boycott the elections, Agar broke ranks and stayed in the race, confident he could take the governorship and that Juba would back him, even as it all but cut loose the SPLM’s other northern candidates. (Recall that Salva says he voted for al-Bashir for president, even though the SPLM’s Yassir Arman remained on the ballot.)

It appears Agar made the right call and that, sometime tonight or tomorrow, the corrupt National Election Commission will declare Malik Agar the freely elected governor of Blue Nile state. We’ll see.

(Photo Credit: Gurtong.net)