Just go – the message from Sudan’s protesters to Bashir
Eight years ago, a wave of popular protest spread across the Arab world, said Adil Babikir in the Sudan Tribune (Paris). And now the Arab Spring has finally reached Sudan. Since midDecember, people across the country have staged almost daily protests against the authoritarian rule of President Omar al-bashir. Their slogan is tasgut bass (“you must go, no matter what”). Social media is full of videos showing protesters “on the front lines chanting revolutionary slogans and taking part in street fights”. Bashir has responded with typical heavyhandedness – in Khartoum, 29 people have been killed by snipers dressed as civilians, reportedly firing both from the ground and the rooftops. Bashir insists the killers were “infiltrators” backed by Israel, but no one believes him. His brutal response has backfired: last week, professional unions representing teachers and pharmacists joined the protests.
Bashir seized power in an Islamist-inspired coup in 1989, said Osama Al-sharif in Arab News (Riyadh), but soon fell out with the Islamists who’d been the backbone of his regime. His power base is the army, yet if the protests get worse, it could step in to replace him. He’ll never step down of his own accord, knowing a future government could hand him over to be tried at the International Criminal Court, which first indicted him in 2009 for the mass murders inflicted by his militias in Sudan’s Darfur region. But his iron grip on the country is loosening. People are no longer prepared to put up with such a high level of corruption and economic mismanagement, or with the way Bashir rigs elections, and discriminates in favour of ethnic Arabs.
Hitherto, Bashir had been able to blame Sudan’s woes on Western aggression, said Thilo Thielke in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The sanctions imposed by the US in the mid-1990s to punish the regime for harbouring Osama bin Laden, were stepped up in 2007 in response to the atrocities in Darfur. But in 2017, the Trump administration lifted the sanctions, saying Sudan was now cooperating in the fight against terrorism. So blaming the foreigner won’t wash anymore. Bashir’s biggest problem is that the oil revenues his regime relied on were lost when South Sudan seceded eight years ago. His government then devalued the currency in an attempt to balance the books, which sent inflation soaring. But it was cutting fuel and wheat subsidies to improve Sudan’s credit status with international lenders that sparked the protests. It’s now clear, said Abdil Babikir, that “popular rage has passed the point of no return”.