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KHARTOUM (Reuters) - The presidential candidate for Sudan's former southern rebels said on Sunday he would bring peace to Darfur, end Khartoum's pariah status, and win office with the backing of millions of marginalised Sudanese.

The Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) on Friday named Yasir Arman as its challenger against Sudan's incumbent President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in April elections.

Arman, a northern Muslim with political clout in Khartoum but little international profile, told Reuters his priorities once elected would include democratic reforms and a public acknowledgement that Darfuris had legitimate grievances.

The SPLM said its leader Salva Kiir would stand for the separate position of president of oil-producing southern Sudan, where the population has been promised a referendum on whether to split off as an independent state in January 2011.

Arman dismissed analysts' suggestions that Kiir's move meant the SPLM was more interested in building up its position in the south, before a widely expected "yes" vote for independence, than in ruling a unified Sudan.

"The fact that I am proposed is a big signal that the SPLM is an organisation where your ethnicity or religion does not make a difference...It is a national organisation," he told Reuters in an interview.

An estimated two million people were killed during more than two decades of civil war between Sudan's Muslim north and the south, where most follow Christianity and traditional beliefs.

A 2005 peace deal promised the election and referendum, and created an interim coalition government between the SPLM and Bashir's northern National Congress Party (NCP).