Sudan wants off U.S. list of terror sponsors
KHARTOUM, Sudan — Sudan’s new prime minister said in an interview Sunday that ending his country’s international pariah status and drastically cutting military spending are prerequisites for rescuing a faltering economy.
Abdalla Hamdok, a former official of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, said he has already talked to U.S. officials about removing Sudan from Washington’s list of countries sponsoring terrorism, and he portrayed their reaction as positive.
He also hopes to drastically cut Sudan’s military spending, which he said takes up as much as 80 percent of the state budget.
Sudan stagnated for three decades under former President
Omar al-bashir, convulsed by a bloody civil war and rebellions in its far-flung provinces. Al-bashir’s autocratic rule ended in April when the military ousted him after mass street protests by a pro-democracy movement, which began late last year.
As Sudan begins a new chapter, getting off the Americans’ state sponsor of terror list is the “key to anything that we can do in this country,” Hamdok said, adding that a “democratic Sudan is not a threat to anybody in the world.”
Still, tensions between the military and civilians are expected to feature prominently in Hamdok’s unruly transitional government, which is expected to last three years before general elections.
In such an environment, Hamdok faces an uphill battle to carry out ambitious economic reforms, said Jehanne Henry, a Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch. Henry said Hamdok “has to work with the generals, who could veto things.”
The U.S. named Sudan a state sponsor of terror in 1993, and the designation stuck through the al-bashir regime.