Southern Sudan's Independence Referendum Vote Passes 60 Percent Participation Validation Mark

YAMBIO, SUDAN - JANUARY 13: A woman and her child sit in the courtyard of a hospital that is run in partnership with Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) January 13, 2011 in the town of Yambio, south Sudan. Yambio, a poor and isolated town near the borders of Central African Republic and the Congo, has had a history of conflict due to the presence of the shadowy paramilitary group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) which has terrorized much of the population along the border regions of the three countries. South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest regions, is participating in an independence referendum following a historic 2005 peace treaty that brought to an end decades of civil war between the Arab north and predominantly Christian and animist south. The south is expected to vote around 99 percent to secede from the north which will also give it a majority of Sudan’s oil. The result is expected to split Africa’s largest country in two. Over two million people were killed in the north-south civil war which began in the 1950`s. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)