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A handful of South Sudanese have voted on the final day of a week-long referendum on whether to split from the north of the country.
Polls closed on Saturday after the 60 per cent voter turnout threshold set for the referendum to be valid was achieved on Wednesday after just four days of polling.
"The voting has now finished. The ballot boxes are locked away safely. The count will start after a break," Joseph Kharin, a referendum commission official, told the AFP news agency.
UN helicopter crews will assist organizers in picking up ballot papers from the remote countryside of a vast, underdeveloped region which has just 40km (25 miles) of paved road for an area the size of France and Belgium combined.
"Preliminary results will be announced on January 31st. Those figures will then have to be verified in Khartoum. If there are no appeals, officials say a final result will be announced on February 6," Al Jazeera's Haru Mutasa, reporting, from Juba.
However, overseas voting in Brisbane, Australia, has been extended for several days as a result of flooding in that region.
Secession expected
Observers have said that they are confident that the result will favor secession from the north.
If the planned timeline is adhered to, south Sudan could secede by July.
"They have technically until the 9th of July, [which is] when the comprehensive peace agreement expires," reported Mutasa.
Jimmy Carter, a former US president who is in the country to observe the poll, said he expected that the north would "recognize the results immediately".
In the few centers where he had seen counting under way, he said, the votes "were practically unanimous in favor of separation with only a few ballots to the contrary".
The referendum marks the culmination of the 2005 comprehensive peace agreement, which ended a civil war in the country.
A senior official of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party (NCP) said the north would accept the outcome of the vote even if it was for partition of Africa's largest nation.
Returning home
Georg Charpentier, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, said a total of 180,000 southerners had returned from the north since November, with more than 15,000 arriving in the week-long polling period alone.
He said the UN was expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 people to arrive by August.
"Obviously the emotions around the referendum have prompted many southerners to come home," he said, speaking at Juba's river port on the White Nile where many of the returnees arrive.
On the streets of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, there was a sense of rueful resignation that the nearly nine million people of the south were poised to break away - and take with them some 80 per cent of Sudan's oil reserves - leaving the north's 32 million people to go it alone.
"I feel sad," Mustafa Mohammed, a young tax officer, said. "I am not for secession."
PHOTO CAPTION
Two Southern Sudan Referendum Commission staff members close a ballot box after the closing of the referendum on the self-determination of South Sudan at the El Fasher polling centre in North Darfur January 15, 2011.
Al-Jazeera
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