In the Triangular Capital, where Africa’s Blue and White Niles meet, military leaders insist they will not go back to the pre-25 October transitional phase while civilian leaders are adamant that there should only be civil governance. In the meantime, international pressure is mounting, reports Haitham Nouri.
Last Sunday and Monday the Professionals’ Association called for a general strike, and thousands took part albeit in smaller numbers than on the previous such move on 30 October. The association is the backbone of the protest movement that ended Omar Al-Bashir’s 30-year reign through a series of demonstrations that swept the nation from December 2018 to April 2019.
The past few weeks’ protests were organised under the motto “No partnership, no negotiation,” escalating the conditions with which the association was content following the overthrow of Al-Bashir. In 2019, the Sudanese agreed to a power-sharing formula whereby the civilian and military camps would share a sovereign council – acting as the head of state – to rule for a three-year transition until elections were held in July 2023.
“De-escalating the tension on the street requires a magnanimous effort,” Osman Al-Boshri, a leader in the national Umma Party, the largest political organisation in Sudan according to the last elections, of 1986, told Al-Ahram Weekly, from Khartoum. “No single party can rule Sudan on its own. Neither the army, nor the civilians. The situation is much more complicated.”
With the current status quo, it is difficult to go back to the transitional phase, Al-Boshri opined, ruling out the possibility of forming a sovereign council comprising the figures the military proposed. “Malik Aqar and Al-Hadi Idriss are refusing to be on the council without going back to the pre-25 October arrangement.”
Aqar and Idriss are leaders of armed groups that had fought against Al-Bashir for decades.
“We need the army to impose peace, organise the return of refugees and those displaced by the war, collect arms from the movements that spent years fighting Al-Bashir’s regime, and integrate the fighters of those movements into the armed forces.
“This will raise the profile of the army socially and politically, as was the case following the 1972 agreement to stop the war in South Sudan. However, without political cover and social consensus, peace will fall apart just like the 1972 accord failed,” he said, referring to violating the agreement in 1983 at the hands of Jaafar Numeiri and southern leader Joseph Lagu, triggering the civil war that ended with the secession of the south in 2011.
The present events are the 18th military takeover of power in Sudanese history since independence in January 1956. The majority of the moves failed, but there were a number of successful regime changes, such as the one under the leadership of Ibrahim Abboud between 1958 and 1964, Numeiri’s between 1969 and 1985 and Al-Bashir’s from 1989 to 2019.
Many parties participated in attempts to take over power, such as the Umma Party, whose leader at the time Abdullah Khalil organised the 1958 coup; communists and nationalists backed Numeiri; and the Muslim Brotherhood led by Hassan Al-Turabi executed a coup to help Al-Bashir to become president.
All the players in the Sudanese court should shoulder the responsibility for the current state of affairs, Al-Boshri said, adding that “the civilians’ fight for power, the failure of a large number of ministers to run the affairs of their ministries and the procedures of the Empowerment Removal Committee are the main problems of the civilian camp. We cannot escape the fact that many ministers failed, although the first government of technocrats couldn’t lift subsidies to initiate negotiations with the International Monetary Fund.”
The Empowerment Removal Committee damaged democracy the most, Al-Boshri insists. The committee is known as the body assigned to erase the repercussions of the 1989 coup. “The committee fired civil servants who were employed during Al-Bashir’s tenure.”
Wagdi Saleh, a leader in the Baath Party and a prominent member of the Empowerment Removal Committee, however, said, “we are fighting a vast network of corruption. No wonder the committee did not win the hearts of a large number of state leaders and the army. They want to disassemble the committee and, consequently, quell the revolution. But, ‘there is no going back’,” Saleh quoted the revolutionaries’ slogan against the recent military intervention.
Many people would have loved to see the committee maintaining its role in the rights field; preparing reports on corrupt people that would then be sacked and others appointed via national competitions held periodically. “This is no longer possible. We are facing a mountain of corruption. This is a rich, vast network that can spoil evidence and nip investigations in the bud,” said Saleh.
All the parties represented in the government have no political experience in elections. Furthermore, many observers doubt the Professionals’ Association can win if elections for professionals’ syndicates and labour unions were held.
“The syndicate organisations in the Professionals’ Association were formed after their failure to win against the Islamists in their syndicates,” said Al-Boshri.
For his part journalist Mohamed Al-Asbat, former spokesman of the association, said: “The Islamists’ victory in syndicate elections was not the norm. They had usually won a few seats, but with Al-Bashir in power, the Islamists were in control of the state and hence secured one victory after the other.”
He believes that “if fair elections were held, the Islamists would reveal their weakness. In all the countries the Islamists had secured victory in professional syndicates, the government was in on it. It enabled them to impose social and professional hegemony in return for not harassing the corrupt elite,” Al-Asbat continued.
Asked about the whereabouts of Mohamed Dagalo, aka Hamidti, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, Al-Boshri said that he is “a Bedouin with a hunch. He knew he had to hide when push came to shove. If the army wins he will re-emerge in his military uniform. If it loses, he will disown them. In the Umma Party, we don’t stand against Hamditi. He is close to us because the Roziqat tribe belongs to the Ansar sect. We are ready to support Hamidti on condition that he takes off the military uniform and presents himself as an independent civilian,” Al-Boshri referred to Hamidti’s conversation with the leader of the Ansar and the late figurehead of the Umma Al-Sadek Al-Mahdi.
It appears that the Umma Party is at present close to the Arab tribes of west Sudan. The current president of the party is Nasser Burma, a general and 1980s defence minister who belongs to western tribes.
According to many Sudanese rights activists, Burma founded the Popular Defence Forces in the second half of the 1980s from herding tribes in Darfur to fight against the farmers of Fur and Masalit tribes.
Al-Bashir rehabilitated the Popular Defence Forces to become the Janjaweed militias that were later accused of war crimes in the Darfur War in 2003, which claimed the lives of 300,000 Sudanese, and resulted in the rape of dozens of women and the displacement of millions, according to UN figures.
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