UN envoy: Sudan's new deal saved the country from civil war

Here is a full copy of a news report published at abcnews.go.com

Written by NOHA ELHENNAWY Associated Press (AP)

Dated and published at abcnews.com on Friday 26 November 2021, 20:53

UN envoy: Sudan's new deal saved the country from civil war

The U.N. envoy to Sudan says a deal struck to reinstate the country's civilian prime minister after a military coup is imperfect but has saved the country from falling into civil strife

The Associated Press

Thousands of protesters take to the streets to renew their demand for a civilian government in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, Thursday, Nov. 25, 2021. The rallies came just days after the military signed a power-sharing deal with the prime minister, after releasing him from house arrest and reinstating him as head of government. The deal came almost a month after the generals orchestrated a coup. Sudan’s key pro-democracy groups and political parties have dismissed the deal as falling short of their demands for a fully civilian rule. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali)

CAIRO -- The deal struck in Sudan to reinstate the prime minister following a military coup is imperfect but has saved the country from sliding into civil strife, the U.N. envoy to Sudan said on Friday.

Special Envoy Volker Perthes was speaking of the agreement between Sudan's military leaders and Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, who was deposed and put under house arrest following the coup last month that stirred an international outcry.

The military takeover threatened to thwart the process of democratic transition that the country had embarked on since the ouster of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir.

The deal, signed on Sunday, was seen as the biggest concession made by the country's top military leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, since the coup. However, the country's pro-democracy groups have dismissed it as illegitimate and accused Hamdok of allowing himself to serve as a fig leaf for continued military rule.

“The agreement of course is not perfect,” Perthes told The Associated Press. “But it is better than not having an agreement and continuing on a path where the military in the end will be the sole ruler."

Both signatories felt compelled to make “bitter concessions” in order to spare the country the risk of more violence, chaos and international isolation, he added.

“It would not have been possible to exclude a scenario which would have brought Sudan to something close to what we have seen in Yemen, Libya or Syria,” Perthes said. He spoke to the AP via videoconference from Khartoum.

Sudan has been struggling with its transition to a democratic government since the military overthrow of al-Bashir in 2019, following a mass uprising against three decades of his rule.

The deal that Hamdok signed with the military envisions an independent Cabinet of technocrats led by the prime minister until new elections are held. The government will still remain under military oversight, although Hamdok claims he will have the power to appoint ministers.

The deal also stipulates that all political detainees arrested following the Oct. 25 coup be released. So far, several ministers and politicians have been freed. The number of those still in detention remains unknown.

“We have a situation now where we at least have an important step towards the restoration of the constitutional order,” said Perthes.

Since the takeover, protesters have repeatedly taken to the streets in some of the largest demonstrations in recent years. Sudanese security forces have cracked down on the rallies and have killed more than 40 protesters so far, according to activist groups.

Further measures need to taken to prove the viability of the deal, said Perthes, including the release of all detainees, the cessation of the use of violence against protesters and Hamdok's full freedom to choose his Cabinet members.

On Friday hundreds rallied in Khartoum and other Sudanese provinces to demand a fully civilian government and protest the deal for the second straight day. It came after thousands protested on Thursday.

One of the marches was led Siddiq Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi, a leader of Sudan's prominent Umma Party, which has split with other pro-democratic groups over the deal to reinstate Hamdok. He told journalists that protesters must remain steadfast in their calls for the generals to surrender power . Al-Mahdi was among those who were arrested during the coup and was let go in recent days.

He refused the idea of further negotiations.

“As things currently stand, there is no opportunity for things to move forward,” he said.

View original: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/envoy-sudans-deal-saved-country-civil-war-81404904

In Sudan, Hemedti leads the fray (Gérard Prunier)

• In reality, it is Hemedti, the brutal and cunning general who organised the harsh crackdown in Khartoum last June, who wields the real power in Sudan, writes Gerard Prunier
• After arresting Bashir, Hemedti became vice-president of the Transitional Military Council and was effectively its real boss
• The RSF's military and technical equipment in fact come from the United Arab Emirates
• The overthrown regime seemed to embody all the mistakes of the past. Read full story:

In Sudan, General Hemedti leads the fray
Analysis from The New Arab - www.alaraby.co.uk

Dated 5 February 2020

By Gérard Prunier (Former chief of the Centre français des études éthiopiennes in Addis-Abeba, member of the Centre d’études des mondes africains of Paris and author of several articles and books on Sudan)

Since the overthrow and arrest of President Omar al-Bashir on 10 April last year, there has been a fragile cohabitation between civil society and the semi-privatised "armed forces". 

Indeed Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, who represents the civilian side of the set-up, told a visiting US congressional delegation in Khartoum in January that "the civil-military partnership in Sudan could serve as a model for other countries." 

The idea, far from just being a piece of triumphalist braggadocio, raises the question of what has been going on in Sudan in recent months.

A return to civil society

After 25 years of dictatorship, the Islamist regime in Khartoum had nothing more to offer than further failures and mounting corruption. The economic crash was the last straw. In 2018, the price of a kilo of lentils went up by 225 percent, rice by 169 percent, bread 300 percent, and fuel 30 percent. 

There was no cooking gas, or even running water. At the same time, the 2018 budget of Sudanese pounds (SDG) 173 bn (about $27 bn) allocated nearly SDG 24 bn to the military and security sectors, but only just over SDG 5 bn to education and less than SDG 3 bn to health.

Civil society responded to this descent into hell with a spontaneous mobilisation whose roots went back to October 2012, and which now gathered momentum. Workers' groups began setting up professional organisations.

Today there are 17 of them, federated under the umbrella Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA). This clandestine unionism operated with an organisational rigour worthy of the pre-1917 Leninists, but without any particular ideology apart from an embryonic democratism and a rejection of violence.

The slogan "Silmiyya!" (Peaceful!) was to become the rallying cry of the protestors. Political parties which had become more or less forgotten under the 30 years of military-Islamic dictatorship regained at least a little strength, brought together in the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC).

Despite its extraordinary popularity, this democratic movement had three weak points: it was very urban in nature, it grouped essentially the Awlad al-Beled (the Arabs of the central provinces), and apart from the trade unionists of the SPA, it was very divided.

A general backed by the UAE

The situation at the beginning of 2019 was thus somewhat special. The Islamic-military regime was no longer Islamic, and the regular army had been set into competition with paramilitary forces which had become autonomous when then-President Bashir deployed them into overseas conflicts. The dispatch to Yemen of the "volunteers" of the Rapid Support Force (RSF) by their commander, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Daglo aka Hemedti, was crucial.

After arresting Bashir, Hemedti became vice-president of the Transitional Military Council and was effectively its real boss, rather than its official president, Gen. Abdel Fatah Abderrahman Burhan. Significantly, these volunteers are better armed than Burhan's regular army. The RSF's military and technical equipment in fact come from the United Arab Emirates.

Cunning, brutal and intelligent, if little educated, Hemedti became a millionaire through the "muscular" exploitation of the gold mines in western Sudan. He was the Janjaweed militia chief in Darfur, where he committed massive violence before overthrowing President Bashir, who saw him as his protector. 

Hence the ambiguity of the situation: was this a military coup d'état, or a democratic revolution? 

The popular uprising was a mixture of jamboree, open-ended political forum and social solidarity display. Everybody was looking after children - there are lots of them - women were everywhere, and the people came to the capital from afar. The basic slogans: "Silmiya!" (Peaceful!), "Hurriya!" (Freedom!), "Thawra!" (Revolution!), "Didd al-haramiyya!" (Down with the thieves!) and "Madaniyya!" (Civilian!). 

A camp, a festival, a space for joy and celebration, the sit-in was essentially revolutionary.

But while some soldiers were fraternising with the crowd, others, especially in the provinces, were killing or injuring the supporters of change. Those who opened fire on the demonstrators were not soldiers of the regular army, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), which was doing its best to protect them. It was either mercenaries of the RSF who came from Darfur, or an operations unit of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) - the secret services, set up by Salah Gosh.

The uprising in Darfur had already destroyed the image of a "homogenous nation" led by a radical version of Islam, and had exposed the reality of a mafia regime which had deviated into illegal commerce during its dream petrol period between 1999 and 2011.

The "deep state" created by the Islamists had established itself as the ideological - and financial - flipside of a Sudan which had become phoney. For many in Sudan, the events of 2019 were an occasion to go back over developments since independence in 1956. Everything was brought out in the popular debates: the "civil war" with the disparate South, the coups, the empty rhetoric of a democracy lived in fits and starts, Islamism as the magic solution, the colonialism of the centre over all the outlying areas.

Even Arabism did not escape criticism. In this amazing thirst for demystification, the overthrown regime seemed to embody all the mistakes of the past.

Symptoms of the nostalgic revolution

This "nostalgic revolution" has been very ill understood by the international community. There are, of course, parallels with the various "Arab springs" - the same hostility to dictatorship, the same aspiration to democracy, but with no illusions about political Islam, which aroused obvious hostility among the protestors, no doubt because of Sudan's ethnic heterogeneity.

The killer General Hemedti hails from the outlying Darfur area and he has rallied to the RSF flag many soldiers straying from the wars of the Sahel-Chadians, Nigerians, Central Africans, and even some Boko Haram deserters.

He does not harbour hostility to Islam because it is too much part of Sudanese culture to be rejected. But the Islamists who prefer the Islamist "deep state" to their Sudanese homeland have lost control of the population. That is why the attempt by the Saudis and the UAE to preserve an Islamist regime without the Muslim Brotherhood has little chance of success.

Clean up at the NISS barracks

The UAE leader, Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed (MBZ), realised this more swiftly than his Saudi "allies", as indeed did General Hemedti. When on 14 January semi-demobilised elements of the NISS mutinied in two of the barracks where they were cooling their heels, Hemedti's reaction was immediate: his men attacked the barracks, and fighting went on late into the night. 

The mutineers had just learned that their operations unit, which was involved in racketeering, kidnapping and illegal taxation, had been disbanded.

The NISS groups got the worst of it, and their dead were written off. But the General had to make a trip to Abu Dhabi to explain to MBZ precisely what he was up to. He may be the UAE's ally in Sudan, but he is far from being a passive tool in the region, as MBZ realised when Hemedti declined to send reinforcements to Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in Libya, stalled outside Tripoli without being able to take the city. 

The Emiratis were reduced to recruiting "security guards" through small ads using Black Shield Security Services, a UAE front company.

Another example of the Darfur General's autonomy came on 11 January, when groups linked to the Islamist "deep state" tried to organise antigovernment demonstrations at Wad Madani, in central Sudan. Hemedti did nothing to help them, and they had to pay unemployed agricultural workers to swell their ranks.  

So was Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok justified in portraying civil-military relations in Sudan as a model to the Americans? Half. By "military" one means Hemedti, because the regular army no longer controls the situation, either politically or militarily. When there were negotiations in Juba with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (a guerrilla faction which still exists in Kordofan, in the south of Sudan), it was Hemedti who took charge of the talks and won SPLM-North agreement to a framework accord which may be ratified on 14 February.

PM accused of sluggishness

Under the power-sharing agreement signed in Khartoum on 5 July last year, there will be no elections until 2021, and those involved in the current transition will not be allowed to stand. 

PM Abdallah Hamdok is certainly doing what he can. But he is doing it at a pace which is irritatingly slow for a population which had struggled with astonishing determination until June 2019. He has only just dismissed the foreign minister, whose incompetence was a drag on Sudanese diplomacy, resurgent after 30 years of paralysis and corruption.

It remains for the World Bank to be begged for aid which the Americans continue to block on the basis of sanctions imposed earlier on the Islamist regime, and which are now obsolete.

Hemedti appears to maintain correct, but not warm, relations with the prime minister. He has talked to old political parties such as the Ummah of Sadeq al-Mahdi, and more discreetly with others. His men are involved in distributing free food and medicine. Nowadays he recruits his soldiers not just from his native Darfur, but also from among the Awlad al-Beled, the inhabitants of the country's central Nile Valley regions.

What about the people of Darfur, whose relatives he may have massacred? They are queueing up outside his offices in Khartoum. "At least he's someone we know, we know how to handle him. And it would be nice to have one of our own in the presidency, after having been colonised." 

How far will the camel trader turned militia chief go? 

People may object to his lack of education, and to his non-Sudanese origins, but that has not prevented him becoming a key player on the national and regional scenes.

Gerard Prunier is a French academic and historian specialising in the Horn of Africa.

This article was originally published by our partners Orient XXI. 

Join the conversation: @The_NewArab

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Read more: How revolutionaries took over Sudan's neighbourhood committees

View Original: https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2020/2/5/in-sudan-general-hemedti-leads-the-fray

Sudan: Hemeti and RSF, Sudan's ticking time bomb (Part 5)

NOTE from Sudan Watch Editor:  The below copied article from The New Arab is dated 25 May 2015. It is published here as part of a series of blog posts featuring Sheikh Musa Hilal of North Darfur, Sudan.  

Musa Hilal and his relatives and comrades have spent the past two years incarcerated in Omdurman prison, not far from Sudan's capital Khartoum. They were arrested in North Darfur in November 2017 by Hemeti's Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Hemeti ordered his RSF, formerly known as Janjaweed, to arrest his cousin and former boss, Musa Hilal, and bring him to Khartoum alive or dead. Some points from the article:

• Observers feared Hemeti's ambition, which some said could end up destroying the country after the concessions the government has granted him.
• The Janjaweed have played a major role in quelling rebellions in Sudan.
• They are associated with the Sudanese Armed Forces.
• The Janjaweed militia emerged as a powerful political player in Sudan, but the history of militias getting involved in politics suggests all may not end well.
• The Sudanese government allowed 3,000 Janjaweed to deploy in various areas of Khartoum.
• In 2014 the Janjaweed militias were brought under a united command and given their new official name - the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).  Read more:

Article from and by The New Arab www.alaraby.co.uk

Dated 25 May 2015

The Janjaweed, Sudan's ticking time bomb

The Janjaweed have played a major role in quelling rebellions in Sudan [AFP]

Analysis: The Janjaweed militia has emerged as a powerful political player in Sudan, but the history of militias getting involved in politics suggests all may not end well.

The name Janjaweed strikes fear into the hearts of many Sudanese people. 

The Janjaweed, now formally known as the Rapid Support Forces, first gained international notoriety in 2003 at the beginning of the Darfur conflict. Today, the Janjaweed are being accused of new violations - accusations that their leaders and the Sudanese government strongly deny.

The Janjaweed established their presence on the Sudanese political scene very quickly. They are associated with the Sudanese Armed Forces, fighting alongside them in the Sudanese states of the Blue Nile and South Kordofan, as well as in the Darfur region.

A spoiled child or a ticking bomb?

The Janjaweed, however, also enjoy advantages over the official Sudanese army. Their equipment is more advanced and their salaries are higher. Some people here call them the "spoiled child of the Sudanese regime".

However, others see the Janjaweed as a ticking time bomb. By supporting them, the Khartoum government is digging its own grave, they believe, especially as the government has allowed 3,000 Janjaweed to deploy in various areas of the capital itself.

The Janjaweed started out as Arab tribal militia which the government used to suppress the 2003 Darfur rebellion. The government relied on them heavily for this, and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir stated they were responsible for quelling the revolt.

On an international level, the Janjaweed, who have also been known by several other names including the "Border Guards", have been accused of human rights violations in Darfur, including rape and burning villages. These accusations have led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for President al-Bashir and other Sudanese officials, including Defence Minister Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein.

The Janjaweed have also been accused of recruiting foreigners from Arab tribes in Niger, Chad and Mali. 

The government denies this, however, while the leader of the Janjaweed, Mohamed Hamdan Hamidati [aka Hemeti or Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo], says most of his forces are from the Arab tribes of Darfur - and there are no foreigners among them. 

He says he is willing to provide the government with 100,000 fighters if it requests them, and considers fighting for the government a form of paid employment.

In a documentary, Hamidati, who is 43 years old, said he was called to a meeting with Bashir, who requested his help in quelling rebellions in Darfur, the Blue Nile and South Kordofan, offering him money in exchange.

In 2014, the Janjaweed militias were brought under a united command and given their new official name - the Rapid Support Forces. In order to regularise their status, they were placed under the command of the security forces.

It is believed the Sudanese army refused to integrate the Janjaweed within its ranks, because it considered the Janjaweed to be a chaotic militia following a tribal code, rather than a code of combat.

Hamidati admitted as much when he was sacked as a security adviser in South Darfur. "I am a free human being," he said at the time. "I have my clan and my own army and resources. The state governor cannot reduce my authority."

Official status

At the end of 2014, the Sudanese parliament amended the country's interim constitution, turning the security forces into an official state force, like the army and police. This allowed the Rapid Support Forces to become the military branch of the security forces, fighting in several areas.

Most recently, the Janjaweed played a key role in the Battle of Nakhara in south Darfur, inflicting heavy losses on the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). President Bashir celebrated with the Janjaweed near the front lines, rewarding them, promoting their leaders and handing out medals.

Some sources say Hamidati made any participation by the Janjaweed in battle on the government side conditional on the regularisation of their status.

A source close to him said he "learned from the experience of his cousin, Musa Hilal, who took part in the creation of the Border Guards and participated in the government's military campaigns, before being purposely sidelined by the government - despite his status as an MP and his appointment to a federal ministerial post".

Before the constitutional amendment, Hamidati said that he had asked for a law to be passed allowing the Border Guards, whose intelligence operations he headed, to have powers and military ranks similar to those of the regular forces.

Hamidati demanded participation in government and the development of the areas inhabited by Rihal Arabs in Darfur, pointing to their role in ending the rebellion there and making a success of the Khartoum and Doha negotiations with armed Darfur rebel groups.

Hamidati holds the rank of brigadier and says he achieved it through his military successes, despite having never attended a military academy. He is also a leader of Darfur's Arab tribes, which fought against the rebels in that area.

He became a leader of the Border Guards, which Musa Hilal formed in 2003, and was appointed as a security adviser in South Darfur state. He was later sacked after being accused of involvement in violence in South Darfur.

His sacking occurred after his dispute with the former governor of South Darfur, Hamad Ismail. Ismail had targeted Hamidati's Ruzayqat al-Abalah tribe, the Janjaweed ledaer claimed. After the two men fell out, violence broke out in South Darfur.

After the latest violence, Hamidati became a more important figure, especially as Hilal's fortunes with the government waned. Hamidati said that if his tribe were disempowered in South Darfur, the rebellion would return.

He has become a rising star in the Sudanese press - and, at the same time, a widely feared figure.

Accusations of abuses
In addition to the human rights violations they are accused of in Darfur, his forces are accused of looting and killing people in areas they passed through when they returned from the battlefields of South Kordofan.

"Our forces are disciplined and do not commit violations," he said. "These violations are committed by others who happen to be leaving at the same time. There may be some indiscipline, but these are individual cases which we deal with straight away. Our troops are not angels and similar things happen in other armed forces."

Observers are concerned, however, with Hamidati's ambition, which some say could end up destroying the country after the concessions the government has granted him.

The government has shown its weakness by turning the Janjaweed into a force above criticism, punishing politicians who have expressed concerns about them, say analysts.

Their promotion has dealt a blow to national dialogue efforts, especially following the arrest of the opposition Umma Party leader, Sadiq al-Mahdi. Mahdi, one of the main figures expected to participate in this dialogue, had accused the Janjaweed of committing crimes and recruiting foreigners.

When Mahdi was arrested, Hamidati said the Janjaweed were now in charge of the country - and they were the ones who could decide whether to release Mahdi or keep him in prison.

Previously, Hamidati used to make statements portraying himself as a source of security and stability. 

When the 3,000 Janjaweed were deployed in Khartoum, Hamidati said they would be the main protection force for the Sudanese capital, allowing denizens to live in peace.

"We came to defend you and you should thank us," he said. "We could have left the rebels to attack you."

The Sudanese government is accused of using the Janjaweed to suppress the September 2013 protests against fuel prices. Hundreds of demonstrators were killed and injured.

In the 1980s the democratically elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi armed the Masiriya and Ruzayqat tribes to fight against the rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), then led by John Garang. 

These became known as "Sadiq's militias".

They were resented by the army. In 1989, under Bashir's command, the army carried out a successful coup against Mahdi. On the day of the coup, Bashir challenged these militias to fight against the army. Some observers believe that the Rapid Response Units may now bring about the fall of the regime.

One military analyst, who asked not to be named in this article, told al-Araby al-Jadeed the bureacracy of the official state forces keeps them less favoured by officials.

"The police and army have well-established systems and traditions that can't be bypassed," he said. "The government has decided that militia warfare is best because of its flexibility. Armies were created to fight other armies and it is difficult for them to fight rebel guerrillas. However, mobilising militias comes at a price - they demand land, power, and money."

The analyst said arming militias always led to problems. He said the government needed to collect the 4,000,000 weapons in the country before the situation gets further out of control. If the situation stayed as now, there will be a new rebellion against the government, he said, leading to new alliances in Darfur that would lead to the region separating from Sudan, like South Sudan did.

Analysts said the inevitable outcome of the Janjaweed's deployment in Khartoum and the conflict zones will be a crisis which would bring chaos to Khartoum, as the Janjaweed are an undisciplined militia and their leader wants to gain power.

Some high-ranking officials from the ruling National Congress Party reportedly want to ally with him, explicitly for this purpose - and this makes the Janjaweed a ticking time bomb.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic edition.

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/politics/2015/5/21/الجنجويد--قنبلة-السودان-الموقوتة

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View original: https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/politics/2015/5/25/the-janjaweed-sudans-ticking-time-bomb

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Sudan’s TMC talks with Alliance of Freedom and Change (AFC) includes NUP, SLA-MM, SPLM-N

Article from Al-Ahram Weekly.org.eg

By HAITHAM NOURI

Published Thursday 4 Jul 2019

Title: Sudan’s message to the world

Sudan needs a government of technocrats and interest-based relationships with other countries if its political transition is to succeed, says Deputy Chairman of National Umma Party Mariam Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi from Khartoum

Photo caption: Sudan’s message to the world

Sudan’s opposition Alliance of Freedom and Change (AFC) returned to the capital Khartoum after a two-day visit to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, where its delegation held meetings with leaders of the African Union (AU) and African ambassadors “to update them on the situation in Khartoum.”

The AFC delegation comprised opposition figures Wagdi Saleh, Hassan Abdel-Ati, Monser Al-Tayed and Moetaz Saleh, in addition to Deputy Chairman of the opposition National Umma Party (NUP) Mariam Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi.

It also included Mona Arko Minawi, head of the Sudan Liberation Army-Minni Minawi (SLA-MM) and Yassir Arman, deputy chairman of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), militarily active in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan states.

Al-Mahdi, a physician, has been one of the “staunchest opponents” of the 30-year regime of ousted former president Omar Al-Bashir who toppled her father’s government in June 1989.

Since the onset of negotiations between the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the AFC, the umbrella bloc that includes the NUP headed by Mariam’s father Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi, the physician has been a member of the team negotiating with the TMC.

She did not take part in the latest round of negotiations that took place after communications were temporarily severed between the TMC and AFC, however. Sitting in her stead was Ibrahim Al-Amin.

“These negotiations are part of an attempt to break the ranks of the AFC,” Mariam Al-Mahdi told Al-Ahram Weekly in an interview from Khartoum. “But it is normal to change the members of the negotiating delegation, particularly if the talks take a long time, as is the case with Sudan.”

Like her father, she has been no stranger to jail and self-exile. But she has always preferred to stay in Khartoum to make fiery statements against Al-Bashir’s regime and take part in opposition activities over the past two decades.

With the eruption of the nationwide protests that toppled Al-Bashir on 6 April, Al-Mahdi ended her self-exile and returned from London, despite facing threats from Sudan’s security forces, according to family sources.

Al-Mahdi was not arrested when she arrived in Sudan, but she was later arrested along with her sister Rabah on charges of illegal protests. The sisters were fined, but they refused to pay.

Al-Mahdi told the Weekly that the AFC’s visit to Addis Ababa was “important. We met the chairperson of the AU Commission and a number of African ambassadors to put them in the picture about what is happening in Sudan.”

“The AU has suspended Sudan’s membership until authority is handed over to a civilian government. This is in line with AU agreements,” she said.

The AU also froze Burkina Faso’s membership following the overthrow of dictator Blaise Compaore in 2014 within the framework of the 2003 Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union. The AU had earlier granted the TMC three months to hand over power to a civilian government.

Al-Mahdi pointed to the “positive environment” in Addis Ababa that houses the headquarters of the AU Commission. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had also stepped in to mediate between the AFC and TMC, she said.

She accused the TMC of “stalling in handing over authority” to civilians. “We don’t want to end one period of authoritarian rule to be handed over to another one. We want a government of technocrats as soon as possible,” she added.

Regarding accusations made by the TMC that it was the AFC that was “stalling the negotiations,” Al-Mahdi said that “this is not true. We accepted Ethiopia’s mediation to resume the talks, albeit with conditions, such as investigating the dispersal of the sit-in [in front of the army headquarters in central Khartoum], the resumption of Internet services and freeing the detainees.”

“We suspended the successful civil disobedience out of a desire to build trust, offer our good will and show our commitment to the negotiations. The TMC has not responded to any of our demands.”

NUP head Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi had rejected the calls for a general strike and civil disobedience on the grounds that these were “escalatory measures” against the TMC, which he called a “partner in change.”

TMC Spokesperson Shamseddin Al-Kebashi said that elements from the armed forces had dispersed the sit-in “without receiving orders from general command.”

He said the army was intent on investigating their conduct and would punish them if they were found to have contravened orders.

Activists have pointed accusing fingers at the Rapid Support Forces (RDF) led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). The Sudan Doctors’ Union said 118 Sudanese were killed in the incident, while the Ministry of Health put the figure at 46.

Al-Mahdi avoided implicating any specific party, saying “let’s leave it to a neutral investigating committee” instead.

She stated that she was coordinating with Saudi Arabia and the UAE after she and her father had received the Riyadh and Abu Dhabi ambassadors at their house in Omdurman.

“We want to establish interest-based relationships with all the countries in the world. We don’t want relationships between rulers that are then terminated with the end of their regime. We want relationships based on clear economic and political interests and relationships that don’t change no matter how governments change,” Al-Mahdi told the Weekly.

“Sudan has plenty to offer the Arab world and Africa, primarily in the economic field. We don’t want the aid we received during Al-Bashir’s rule. We want investments that will be to the benefit of all,” she added.

“Why is it that when Ethiopia offered to mediate, no one in Sudan objected, and then their voices grew louder when it came to Sudan’s relationship with Gulf countries? The Gulf countries, Egypt and Ethiopia are our neighbours. This is a fact no one can deny,” Al-Mahdi said.

“Everybody wants to end the state of stagnation, but any hint at holding elections within nine months or [anytime soon] is refused,” she stated.

Regarding news that the TMC could ask Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi to form a civilian government, Mariam Al-Mahdi said that “this can’t take place unless there is nationwide accord from the TMC, the AFC, and all the groups in Sudan. It is a big step that can’t be taken without a consensus.”

 *A version of this article appears in print in the 4 July, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Sudan’s message to the world

SOURCE: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/337250/World/Region/Sudan’s-message-to-the-world.aspx