Bashir's Old Guard Jockeys for Power as Sudan's Protests Rage On
(Bloomberg) -- Sudanese pro-democracy protesters won further concessions from the army that overthrew President Omar al-Bashir, as upheaval in the ruling military council signals a power struggle among the remnants of his 30-year regime.
In the four days since it took control, the council has canceled its curfew, released prisoners, changed its leadership and vowed to review contentious laws that once saw Sudanese stand trial for perceived indecency or apostasy, all in a sop to mass protests. Yet it hasn’t budged on the key opposition demand of an immediate handover to civilians -- insisting on as long as two years -- and Mohamed Hamdan, the chief of a powerful militia accused of rights abuses, has been named its deputy head.
The failure of Hamdan, veteran spy chief Salah Gosh and army leaders to “agree on a division of labor among them and a joint strategy to deal with the protesters has been on full display in the last 48 hours,” said Harry Verhoeven, author of ‘Water, Civilization and Power in Sudan.’ Instead, there’s “coercive jockeying for power within what remains” of al-Bashir’s regime.
The ouster of al-Bashir, one of Africa’s longest-serving rulers, followed four months of protests across the oil-producing nation in which dozens of people were killed. Now under house arrest, he’s the second North African leader forced from office this month in the face of mass demonstrations, following Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. It’s stirred echoes of the Arab Spring uprisings earlier this decade.
Security Alliances
In the final days of al-Bashir’s rule, soldiers clashed with security forces attempting to crush a sit-in outside army headquarters in the capital, Khartoum. Several soldiers were killed, laying bare splits in the complex political-security alliances the 75-year-old president forged after seizing power in a 1989 coup. The threat of more internecine fighting likely contributed to al-Bashir’s associates’ decision to remove him.
As a result, what Sudan has so far is “Bashirism without Bashir,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and a Sudan expert.
Defense Minister Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, who announced the coup Thursday, quit his leadership of the transitional military council less than two days later, as protesters raged against a prominent member of al-Bashir’s regime wielding power.
On Sunday, the council announced the general will be sent into retirement and that Sudan’s ambassador to Washington, Mohamed Ata, the former head of the National Intelligence and Security Service, is being replaced. Gosh, who twice served as NISS’s chief, resigned Saturday.
Sudan’s rulers are now “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,” De Waal said.
The council’s new leader, Abdel Fatah al-Burhan, was chief of staff of Sudan’s ground forces, reportedly involved in coordinating assistance to a Saudi Arabia-led war against Houthi rebels in Yemen. In that post, he worked with Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary unit with its roots in the Janjaweed militia accused of terrorizing Darfur during the war that began there in 2003.
‘Unstable’ Deal
As Sudanese refuse to leave the streets, there’s no guarantee the council’s latest formation will be any longer lasting.
“The deal between the army, NISS and the paramilitaries is fundamentally unstable because of the rivalries among them and because they won’t be able to resolve the challenge of the mass protesters,” De Waal said. “It’s actually more dangerous than when Bashir was there.”
The main protest groups, united as the Forces of the Freedom and Change Declaration, have met the military council to present their demands for a civilian handover, winning a pledge for greater political and media freedoms.
The council on Sunday asked the opposition to submit suggestions for a new cabinet and later announced it would review the public order law. Derived from a hard-line reading of Shariah, it prescribed punishments such as whipping for certain alleged crimes.
Emerging Splits
But splits are beginning to emerge in the opposition too: The National Consensus Forces, one of the alliance’s main components, accused other members of preventing it from putting its ideas to the council and hijacking the talks. Meanwhile, a rebel alliance fighting in Darfur and two southern states said the delegation failed to present its demands for a peace initiative.
That may blunt the opposition’s bargaining power. But Sudan’s new rulers -- while they have no shortage of armed might -- are also in a precarious position, according to Verhoeven.
“Further elite fragmentation is both to be expected and likely to be violent,” he said.
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