KHARTOUM, Sudan — On Sunday, the streets of cities across Sudan thrummed with hundreds of thousands of protesters for the ninth time in eight weeks.
Dec. 19 marked three years since the start of a revolution here — a nationwide convulsion that led to the fall of a 30-year dictatorship, an unprecedented months-long sit-in outside the military’s headquarters, the dispersal of that pro-democracy demonstration in a massacre, and the birth of an energetic protest movement spearheaded by young people who want a more dignified life and a functioning, fully civilian government.
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On Oct. 25, whatever progress they had made seemed to be erased by a military coup. Since that day, the country’s largest doctors union says, at least 45 more names have been added to a list of hundreds of people security forces have killed in crackdowns aimed at breaking the movement’s spirit.
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Despite persistently huge turnouts at protests and rumors that the country’s military leaders are on the verge of resignation, even the revolution’s true believers cannot conceal their despair.
“When revolution exploded, we grinned with freedom on our face,” said Khaldah Ramadan, 47, a PhD student specializing in political strategy who has led countless protests. “Three years later, I am still marching because if I stop, all that remains is darkness. But on most days, that is what I have: darkness and the suspicion that we are moving from one military regime to another and that generations of Sudanese will waste our lives in endless revolution.”
For many like Ramadan, the worry becomes debilitating, the disappointment crushing, and the time spent feeling like time wasted.
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As Hisham Matar, the novelist from neighboring Libya, wrote in his memoir about his own country’s failed uprising — part of an Arab Spring whose embers are barely alive in Sudan — “revolutions are not solid gates through which nations pass, but a force comparable to a storm that sweeps all before it.”
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In Sudan, the storm has stalled over the capital, Khartoum, where it draws strength from disillusioned youth. The median age here is 19. More than 40 percent of young people are unemployed. Sudan’s development indicators put it on par with Haiti, and below Afghanistan and Syria.
“Three years of marching — that’s not what we wanted,” said Ramadan. “We want jobs, a decent life, peace. We wanted women’s voices to be heard in politics. Instead — and it hurts to say this but — the revolution has damaged us. We are more awakened, yes, but only to our own suffering.”
‘We all need to come together’
On Dec. 19, 2018, a group of protesters did the unthinkable and burned down an office of the National Congress Party — the Islamist bastion of dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir — in the city of Atbara, 200 miles downstream from Khartoum on the Nile. The protesters were infuriated by rising bread prices that were forcing families to forgo meals.
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But the fury toward Bashir had many causes. He had consolidated the military’s control over the economy, invited crippling sanctions on Sudan by supporting groups considered terrorists by Western governments, led a campaign of genocide in the Darfur region, and fought numerous other wars that decimated the countryside and led to the secession of South Sudan in 2011, stripping Sudan of 90 percent of its oil revenue, its biggest source of income.
Masses descended on downtown Khartoum calling for his ouster. “Just fall,” was the common refrain. And once the military deposed him in April 2019, and his former officers took power themselves, the new chant became “Freedom, peace and justice, the revolution is the will of the people.”
Because Sudan’s history since independence in 1956 has been marked by revolutions, dictatorships, coups and countercoups, many Sudanese have a revolutionary mind-set, but even more have become hardened pragmatists. The voices of the latter are becoming louder as the revolution slides into its fourth year and the military reasserts itself.
“The revolutionaries are now preoccupied with getting people into the streets, but they have no leader, no vision, no consensus — it is just chaos, crisis after crisis,” said Mohamed Ali Bakur, 35, a member of the Forces of Freedom and Change, a political party that grew out of the revolution but has since splintered into two groups — one supporting negotiations with the military on a path toward elections and the other wanting all of Sudan’s leaders to resign immediately and be replaced with new ones. Bakur is in the camp that sees the military as a necessary partner in achieving the revolution’s ultimate goals.
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“Each time the revolutionaries disagree, the military gets more power,” he said. “Sudan is a big country. We have the military, paramilitaries, tribal militias, hundreds of political parties, countless resistance committees supporting the revolution in every neighborhood in every city. It might sound impossible, but we all need to come together and broadly agree on the way forward. And without the military, there is no way. You end a military-led government abruptly and everything comes down with it — just look at the region around us.”
Like many revolts in the Arab world, Sudan’s was initially viewed eagerly in the West and fearfully in powerful Persian Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who see uprisings in the region as opportunities for latent forces within their own countries to call for change.
In Egypt, the neighbor with which Sudan shares the closest history, the result was a new military-led government and economy. Many here see Sudan going the same way, especially after the Oct. 25 coup.
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The military takeover was followed by the suspension of the constitution; the imprisonment of the civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok; weeks of Internet blackout; and the arbitrary imprisonment of protest leaders. Sudan’s much-vaunted process of reintegration into the global economy was put on hold by Western powers, and more than a billion dollars in aid has been suspended.
The economy, which had been slowly steadying, is now headed back to the levels of inflation that sparked the revolution in the first place. Hamdok, who made a deal with the military for his release, has now lost much of his legitimacy in the eyes of protesters, who wanted him to take a more principled stand and refuse release until demands for a fully civilian government were met.
Now, murals painted to thank Hamdok for his leadership in the revolution’s early years are covered in graffiti calling him a phony and a traitor. The coup, however, had little to do with Hamdok himself, analysts and diplomats said. Rather, it was part of a purge of unyielding revolutionaries from his civilian government who wanted military leaders to face prosecution for crimes they allegedly committed under Bashir and during the breakup of the sit-in.
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“The military brought Hamdok back because they need the [Western] money to come in. They’ve taken over not just the government but the economy, too, so they need it just like anyone else,” said Kholood Khair, managing partner at Insight Strategy Partners, a policy research think tank in Khartoum. Western governments have said a return to the pre-coup status quo is necessary to unblock aid, and Hamdok’s release is just one part of that.
Sudan remains in a state of emergency, and the treasury is less than two months from running out of reserves, current and former government officials recently told Bloomberg News and the Reuters news agency.
‘We are sliding backward’
On Sunday, Khartoum descended into a familiar scene.
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Lines of security forces guarded key government buildings and bridges that cross the Nile. Enormous crowds emerged onto the dusty streets of Khartoum and its sister cities, Bahri and Omdurman.
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By midafternoon, protesters had breached the barricades set up by the army at two key bridges and swarmed into downtown, surrounding the presidential palace. So many tear-gas canisters were used on protesters that the booms of their launching did not cease for four hours and the acrid smell and tear-inducing sting remained throughout the town well into Monday. Many of the canisters, as well as stun grenades and live bullets, were shot directly at protesters, and about 330 were injured, according to the doctors union. One died.
Protesters initially rejoiced when security forces temporarily withdrew, allowing them to occupy the plaza in front of the palace, but hours later, they were dispersed, with dozens beaten and arrested by police and a paramilitary organization called the Rapid Support Forces. On Monday, office workers walked over shattered glass and empty tear-gas canisters on their way to work.
It wasn’t the future Samuel Dafallah, 51, had envisioned when, at Khartoum’s vast, jubilant sit-in in 2019, the fall of Bashir had been announced. He holds a doctorate in economics but is unemployed and has given himself full time to organizing protests.
“Are we asking for something so complicated — a competent, civilian government?” he asked Sunday, taking a break from the action in the street to sip a glass of hot milk in a cafe and regain his energy.
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Outside, as night fell, the sound of protesters drumming and singing had been replaced by the shouting of security forces planning their crackdown. A group of protesters that had been using a Sudanese flag as a prayer mat got up and ran.
“We are sliding backward into our past,” Dafallah said. “The faces may change, but until the people are in power, nothing else will ever change.”
Read more:
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