Sudan’s young revolutionaries dare to hope
The midday sun blasting off the black tarmac made the street feel like an oven, but the young men drumming on the railway girders seemed oblivious to anything but making the most raucous din possible. “This is the third time we’ve sat on this bridge,” said one young demonstrator, looking down on a sea of people on the street below. “Our parents sat on it and our grandparents sat on it. It was built by the British, and nothing has changed.”
Sudan has seen three revolutions since it gained independence in 1956 – in 1964, 1985 and last month, when Omar Bashir’s 30-year dictatorship ended in a military coup forced by massive street protests.
Today’s young revolutionaries are determined that this time the uprising will not be hijacked by a military junta.
But for now, they are savouring the exhilaration of victory: basking in one of those intoxicating but fleeting moments in history when nothing is certain and anything is possible.
Their protest camp on a once busy highway near the Nile is a sprawling carnival not unlike the Royal Mile during the Edinburgh Fringe.
Each evening, hundreds of men and women stand in solemn silence opposite the entrance to the Navy building in remembrance of those who died over four months of protests. Then it is back to the theatre and fun, epitomised by the deafening drumming from the bridge and a small army of “journalists” armed with microphones made of plastic bottles and string, who roam the crowd, interviewing passers-by and delivering animated reports into cameras made of cardboard boxes.
“It’s our way of pointing out there is no free media here doing this job,” said Alalmidgdan Altayeb, a 20-year-old casual labourer who buttonholed The Telegraph for an “on-camera” comment on the view from Britain. But the festive atmosphere masks a deadly serious struggle for Sudan’s future.
The Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), the umbrella group representing the revolutionaries, and the Military Transitional Council, the interim military government set up by the generals after they ousted Bashir on April 4, have officially agreed to a transition to civilian rule. But they are locked in an increasingly acrimonious confrontation about the details,
‘We are going to build a new Sudan without corruption’
including the composition of the interim parliament, government, and “presidential council” that will temporarily replace the head of state.
The demonstrators have proposed a council of seven soldiers and eight civilians. The military this week presented a counter proposal with seven generals and three politicians.
On the same day, the two sides agreed to mediation by a “neutral” team of public figures, including a prominent Khartoum businessman, a respected journalist and a well-known doctor. The opposition also presented a draft constitution, which the military promised to “study”.
Both sides know that the revolutionaries’ main, possibly only, leverage is its control of the streets. Tensions soared on Tuesday when Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy head of the military council, said he would no longer tolerate “chaos” on the streets.
Protesters responded by reinforcing barricades and burning tyres, and braced themselves for a showdown. To drive the point home, the FFC on Thursday brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets in a “march of millions” to pile further pressure on the generals. Soldiers deployed at strategic points across the city did nothing, leaving the protesters in control of their sit-in.
But their big problem, observes Osman Mirghani, a respected newspaper editor who was repeatedly jailed by the previous regime for his blunt political analysis, is the lack of an obvious leader. “The generals don’t have a plan – they’re are waiting for the politicians to give them a plan. But the FFC are divided. They’re five different forces with different ambitions,” he said.
The picture is further complicated by a vast generational divide. More than 60 per cent of Sudan’s population are under 25, and they dominated the protest movement that erupted in December. It is no coincidence that Alaa Saleh, the “Nubian Queen”, an icon of the protests, is a 21-year-old student. And when the Bashir revolutionaries began their final sit-in outside military headquarters in Khartoum on April 6, it was junior officers and men in their 20s who stepped in to defend demonstrators from the security services.
But the longer the deadlock lasts, the more fears grow of an ambitious senior officer launching a counter coup. Most suspicion falls on the intentions of Gen Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who commands the Rapid Response Forces, a militia outside the normal army chain of command.
Hemedti, who has been linked to atrocities committed in Darfur, won some popularity in the aftermath of the coup by claiming he resolved to oust Bashir when the dictator ordered him to clear the protests by force.
But his Rapid Response Force troops remain deployed across the capital in Toyota pickup trucks bristling with heavy machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. And waiting in the wings are wild cards: the Bashir loyalist National Security and Intelligence Service, which fields its own Toyota-borne force, and the “shadow militias” attached to proislamist parties have both have lain low since the revolution.
With so many guns around, it is not difficult to see how a wrong move could spiral out of control.
“Yes,” said Mr Mirghani when asked if he feared a civil war.
“The scenario is Libya or Yemen. One of the two. That’s if they don’t fix this confrontation.”
The truth is no one knows where this heady and unfinished revolution is going. However, the atmosphere in Khartoum is still overwhelmingly optimistic.
Ramadan starts tomorrow, and protesters are already laying the logistical plans to keep the protest going through the month of fasting.
“We’ll be ready for it,” said Omar Alkhwad, 23. “We’re going to build a new Sudan without corruption.”