Sudan Military's Grip on Power Challenged by Democracy Protests
Defense Minister Ibn Auf resigns in surprise shake-up.
(Bloomberg) -- Sudan’s transitional military council announced an end to a curfew and a commitment to hand power to a civilian government within two years, in the latest sign pro-democracy protests are weakening the army’s grip in the oil-producing African nation.
The moves on Saturday followed the decision of Defense Minister Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf to stand down as the head of the council less then two days after the military’s overthrow of Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year rule and just hours after veteran intelligence chief Salah Gosh resigned.
The announcement of the end of the curfew and the vow to hand power to civilians was made in a televised statement by the council’s new chief, Abdel Fatah al-Burhan. But Sudan’s galvanized protesters signaled the moves may not be enough, with the main opposition coalition calling for an immediate transition.
“The coup-makers are in disarray,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and a Sudan expert. Al-Bashir “set up an elaborate political-security system that only he was capable of running,” and now they’re “struggling with the conundrum of how to maintain consensus among a divided and militarized elite, and meet enough of the demands of the protesters to have a modicum of legitimacy.”
As he stepped down late Friday, Ibn Auf said he was seeking “to keep the solidarity of the security system, especially the armed forces.” Kamal Abdul Maarouf was also removed as deputy head of the council.
The ouster of al-Bashir, who himself took power in a 1989 coup, ended the reign of one of the continent’s longest-serving rulers and came after four months of protests in which more than 45 people died.
While demonstrators welcomed the end of his rule, many said it was only a cosmetic change, with other figures that Sudan’s people rebelled against still in charge. Sudan has seen a series of coups since independence in 1956.
The Forces of the Freedom and Change Declaration, an alliance of the main protest groups, kept up its demand for an immediate handover to civilian government, and has dispatched a 10-member delegation to army headquarters to present their road map for a transition, a spokesman for one of the organizations, Satiaa Alhaj, told reporters on Saturday.
The resignation of Gosh, who had twice served as al-Bashir’s spy chief, cheered some protesters.
But the al-Arabiya news channel later reported that Mohamed Hamdan, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, was appointed vice-chief of the military council. The RSF has roots in the Janjaweed militia notorious for its attacks on civilians during the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region that began in 2003.
--With assistance from Okech Francis and Nadeem Hamid.
To contact the reporters on this story: Mohammed Alamin in Khartoum at malamin1@bloomberg.net;Samer Khalil Al-Atrush in Tunis at skhalilalatr@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Karl Maier at kmaier2@bloomberg.net, Michael Gunn, Steve Geimann
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