Coup d’état in Sudan: resistance tries to organize in the streets of Khartoum – archyde

Their silhouettes stand out in the glowing halo of flames devouring the rubber tires. Shrouded in black smoke, dozens of anonymous people pile up bricks and place tree trunks or metal cylinders across a road in the Sudanese capital. “What they destroy, we rebuild it”, one of them lets go, his face covered with soot. A little earlier, militiamen from the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), under the orders of one of the putschist generals, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as “Hemetti”, had cleared the passage, disembarked on board pick-ups equipped with Douchka machine guns. .

On Tuesday October 26, there were no massive demonstrations in the streets of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, but scattered blockages within the neighborhoods. Barricades, held by small groups of protesters, mushroomed on the back roads. A good distance from the armed forces deployed on the main axes, in support of the putschists of General Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane, after the arrest on Monday of the main civilian ministers of the government.

“We will not move from here until this military junta has returned power to civilians, promises a computer science student. Today, I am waiting for justice to be served, I am ready to die for it. “ For him, there is no doubt that General Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane and his former deputy “Hemetti” attempted the coup to escape transitional justice. “They act in their own interests. They are like [l’ancien dictateur Omar] Al-Bashir. You replace the dog with a fox “, abounds an engineer, observing, with folded arms, high school girls screaming shouting revolutionary songs.

“Acts of torture”

This art of the barricade, which they nicknamed “Tetris”, many demonstrators have already practiced during the month of June 2019. At the time already, the soldiers had tried to seize all the power following the overthrow of Omar Al-Bashir. Hundreds of protesters participating in a sit-in outside army headquarters were killed by soldiers and security forces. The peaceful urban guerrilla warfare carried out by the revolutionaries had borne fruit by exhausting the security forces under the orders of the transitional military council which had succeeded the deposed dictator. Above all, it had saved a little time until the civil organizations called for the milioniyya, the March of the Million, which, on June 30, brought the generals to the negotiating table with the coalition of civil parties resulting from the popular uprising.

In his second speech, at midday on Tuesday, General Al-Bourhane refused the term “coup”, preferring to speak of “Rectification of the course of the revolution”. He blamed the divisions within the civilian parties and claimed to have acted in the interest of the people. “He wants to act like [le maréchal Abdel Fattah] Al-Sisi in Egypt, but he forgot that he has no support from the street ”, comments a protester.

After the new master of Khartoum said communications would be restored, the Sudanese rushed to their phones. In a few minutes, the videos recorded since Monday have swept over social networks. “We saw that the army had carried out acts of torture, in particular targeting students and young people. Al-Bourhane says he is acting in the interest of the youth, but we are not fooled ”, deplores the 23-year-old student.

“They decapitated Utopia”

On Tuesday, the soldiers continued their raids on campuses and university boarding schools. Several civil society figures were arrested, such as Yassin Hassan Abdelkarim, president of the Sudanese Teachers’ Committee, Ismail Al-Taj Mustafa, one of the representatives of the Association of Sudanese Professionals (APS), spearhead of the protest of 2019, as well as Siddiq Al-Sadeq Al-Mahdi, a member of the Islamist Ummah party who participated in the dissolved government and brother of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

At nightfall, the connections were again suspended. Shots rang out. In several districts of the capital, mixed forces made up of both regular army soldiers and FSR militiamen charged demonstrators. At midnight, the Association of Sudanese Professionals denounced these attacks on various peaceful gatherings across the country. “We invite the revolutionaries to avoid any skirmish with them and not to hesitate to evacuate the positions in order to save lives”, urged the statement, while stressing the need to continue mass civil disobedience in order to exhaust the armed forces.

“The generals decapitated the utopia built on the sit-in in 2019 and today they are trying again to strangle us in the street”, enraged a protester

Tuesday, the capital was idling against the background of a general strike. Employees of banks, oil companies, administrations, civil servants, teachers and doctors did not come to work. “The generals don’t realize what they have created. They decapitated the utopia built on the sit-in in 2019 and today they are trying again to strangle us in the street ”, enraged a demonstrator. “There will be no turning back”, she repeats like a mantra. Many civil society organizations, led by the APS and the resistance committees, called for a massive mobilization on Saturday, October 30.