First ‘positive steps’ welcomed
SUDANESE protesters have welcomed the “positive steps” taken by the ruling military council, which held talks with opposition leaders over the weekend and released some political prisoners.
The praise came despite a brief incident on Monday in which activists said soldiers tried to disperse the protest sit-in outside the military headquarters in the capital, Khartoum, but eventually backed off.
Last week, Sudan’s military ousted long-time president Omar al-Bashir following four months of street protests against his rule, then appointed a military council that it says will rule for two years or less while elections are organised. Demonstrators fear that the army, dominated by Bashir appointees, will cling to power or select one of its own to succeed him.
The Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), which is behind the protests, repeated its key demand at a press conference in Khartoum, saying the military must immediately give power to a transitional civilian government that would rule for four years.
“The trust is in the street,” said prominent activist Mohammed Naji al-Asam, referring to the ongoing sit-in. The SPA also called on the international community to support civilian rule.
The AU, meanwhile, gave Sudan’s military 15 days to hand over power to a “civilian-led political authority” or face suspension from the union’s activities. It said a civilian authority should hold elections “as quickly as possible”.
Earlier in the day, the SPA urged people to take to the streets, saying: “There is an attempt to break up the sit-in. We appeal to everyone to head to the area to protect your revolution and gains.”
There were no clashes and no one was hurt in the attempted dispersal, but the incident renewed concerns EPA-EFE STR that the military could renege on its promises not to use force against the peaceful demonstrators. Previous attempts to break up the sit-in before al-Bashir’s ouster last Thursday resulted in dozens of people being killed.
On Monday, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the head of the transitional military council, announced an overhaul of the military leadership and appointed a new chief of staff.
The statement said General Hashem Babakr was appointed the joint chief of staff, replacing General Kamal Abdel-Marouf al-Mahi.
A military spokesperson said on Sunday that it would name a civilian prime minister and cabinet – but not a president– to help govern the country. | MORE than 10 000 people have volunteered to crowd-source election results posted at polling stations across Indonesia today, in a real-time bid to thwart attempts at fraud during the biggest single-day election in the world.
Nearly 193million people are eligible to vote for the south-east Asian country’s president and thousands of legislative seats, a Herculean logistical feat many fear cheats could exploit.
Tension over alleged election irregularities is running high between the camps of the two contenders for the presidency, incumbent Joko Widodo and retired general Prabowo Subianto, with charges of suspicious names on electoral rolls and ballot tampering.
An organisation called Kawal Pemilu, or Guard the Election, has brought together volunteers from across the archipelago to post on its website photographs of result tabulations that go up at polling stations to ensure they match official vote tallies.
The crowd-sourced results on KawalPemilu.org will then be tabulated manually by the organisation.
“We aim to be the data back-up plan for the election to ensure transparency and stop fraud,” Kawal Pemilu co-founder Elina Ciptadi said.
More than 10 000 volunteers were verified and 3 000 to 5 000 more have registered online to join the “election guardians”, who have to provide their names and Facebook profiles.
Another 2 000, many of them Indonesian expatriates, will work as moderators, logging in data.
University student and alumni groups have pledged to help, as have the youth wings of prominent religious organisations.
Ciptadi and data scientist Ainun Najib, both Indonesian expats who live in Singapore, started the initiative after the last election in 2014 – also a contest between Widodo and Prabowo.
“Both sides claimed to win but neither of them were revealing the data,” said Ciptadi.
The electoral commission posted 2014’s polling station results on its website, so the group was able to scrape numbers into a database and crowd-source accurate results in six days, while officials took more than two weeks to calculate them.
This time the challenge is even greater. For the first time Indonesia will be holding presidential and parliamentary polls simultaneously, with more than 245 000 candidates running for legislative seats. |
Agency (ANA)