Demonstrations and Protests

Herman J. Cohen is the former assistant secretary of state for African affairs (1989–1993), the former U.S. ambassador to the Gambia and Senegal (1977–80), and was a member of the U.S. Foreign Service for thirty-eight years. You can find his blog here. While the Sudanese military expelled President Omar al-Bashir from office, the people of Sudan are ultimately responsible for toppling his regime, and the leaders of the protest movement have promised not to let up until civilian rule is secured. They well know that any persistence of military control represents a continuation of the Bashir regime, and in particular, the Arabic-speaking population’s monopoly of power. For three decades they have endured the suppression of civil society, labor unions, freedom of press and religion, and any real measure of democratic expression or development. The Sudanese people have enough experience with the security apparatus Bashir created to know that exchanging one general with another does not represent improvement. A loss of oil revenue to the independent South, a rise in state corruption, and a series of devastating internal conflicts all contributed to the end of Bashir’s reign, which itself began in a 1989 coup. Supporting al-Bashir was the National Islamic Front (NIF) party, and its leader, Hassan el-Turabi, a devoted revolutionary with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, who believed a Salafist Sudan under his leadership could spread Islamism throughout the Horn and North Africa. The NIF’s vote share in parliamentary elections consistently topped out at 15 percent, excluding them from participation. With guidance from el-Turabi, al-Bashir coopted the NIF’s Islamist ideology as a political rationale for the coup, leading to the imposition of Sharia-based law—and ultimately, an entanglement with the United States. El-Turabi spent the first few years of the junta supplying weapons to Islamist revolutionaries in Tunisia, Libya, and southern Egypt. He also revised Sudan’s immigration laws to allow all citizens of Arab nations to enter Sudan visa-free and reside there—enabling extremist groups to set up shop in the country. During a 1992 visit to Khartoum, I saw a city map in the American Embassy showing the office locations for nine Middle Eastern extremist groups. It was around this time that a wealthy scion named Osama bin Laden fled Saudi Arabia to establish a foothold in Khartoum. One year later, the World Trade Center was bombed. The Clinton administration designated Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism, and the U.S.-Sudan relationship became embroiled in sanctions, diplomatic withdrawals, and condemnations by the UN. By 1996, economic and political isolation were taking a heavy toll. Turabi’s influence began to wane. Sudanese officials began asking foreign governments how they could ease the pressure; one move was to expel bin Laden to Afghanistan. Yet Sudan’s involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole bombing deepened its reputation as a pariah state.  Meanwhile, the Khartoum government was continually dogged by its conflict with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the rebel group fighting for self-determination in the country’s majority-Christian south. A major oil discovery in 1999 provided revenue and helped the Khartoum regime to stabilize its control, but provided little or no benefit for the people of the south where the oil itself was located.  George W. Bush’s 2000 election marked a turning point for U.S.-Sudan relations. The U.S. had been providing substantial humanitarian aid for the drought-stricken South. But the new administration wanted to mediate a lasting solution to the internal conflict, motivated largely by Bush’s key evangelical Christian constituency. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe was particularly vocal regarding South Sudan’s Christians.  In 2005, the Bush administration’s efforts bore fruit with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Khartoum government and the SPLM. Bush himself was involved in this process—Salva Kiir’s famous Stetson hat, which he is rarely seen without, was a gift from the then-president. After a transitional period, the agreement provided for a 2011 referendum on South Sudanese independence, which passed with over 98 percent of the vote. But Khartoum’s problems continued. The new nation of South Sudan enjoyed sovereignty over the oil deposits and revenue Khartoum previously controlled. Although Khartoum was able to negotiate a $24-per-barrel transit fee for oil passing from South Sudan through its territory to Port Sudan in the north, the Sudanese economy was crippled. Youth unemployment and overall poverty levels skyrocketed. The military regime became increasingly corrupt.  Above all, the problem in Khartoum was al-Bashir, one of the worst dictators the world has seen in the post-colonial era. Bashir stole billions from his people while they suffered through poverty and famine. In Darfur, Bashir responded to an insurgency among non-Arabs with a campaign of genocide, slaughtering hundreds of thousands. Bashir did not simply roll back Sudan’s fledgling democracy; he replaced it with fraudulent elections and a kleptocracy designed to keep him in power. To secure his thirty-year dictatorship, he created a “hydra-headed” security state which, having turned on Bashir, may now struggle internally over control of the country, as Alex de Waal recently chronicled in AfricanArguments (and in the case of the various paramilitary organizations Bashir created, perhaps violently). Besides Sudan’s total lack of democratic institutions and a massive national security sub-state designed to thwart their development, the protest movement will also have to contend with the fact that political power has always been controlled by Arabic-speaking elites. With the separation of the south, the Sudanese people are nearly all Muslim, but Arabic speakers remain a minority, despite their disproportionate influence. It will be a challenge to reform the country’s power structures and create a system which fairly shares control among all Sudanese. Yet as al-Bashir learned, it is a mistake to underestimate the power of the protesters. With support from the African Union, they are rejecting half-baked proposals from Sudan’s generals for a joint interim government which would maintain military control. The Sudanese people’s unrelenting demand for real change even after al-Bashir’s ouster is remarkable, and a reason for cautious optimism. After three decades of dictatorship, no one is more familiar with the numerous obstacles to democracy and prosperity than the Sudanese themselves.

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Abigail Van Buren is an interdepartmental program assistant at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.  On December 19, 2018, Sudanese demonstrators took to the streets of Atbara after the government reduced bread subsidies, ostensibly because of a rise in inflation. From Atbara, the protests spread to al-Qadarif, Omdurman, and Khartoum, eventually spanning thirty-five cities and fifteen of Sudan’s eighteen provinces. In the last six weeks, police have fired tear gas and live ammunition, instituted curfews, arrested journalists, and blocked social media to quell protests. Bashir does not appear to have confirmed this himself. The government puts the death toll at thirty-five, while human rights groups put it at fifty-one. While initially triggered by the cost of bread, the protestors have since directed their anger at President Omar al-Bashir’s rule more generally. Most recently, in 2013, a comparable, youth-led protest erupted after the government reduced fuel and gas subsidies, which evolved into broad calls for solutions to youth unemployment, lower costs of living, and even Bashir’s resignation. Bashir approached this protest with the same tactics he is using today, including media blackouts and police crackdowns. In 2013, those tactics worked, and the demonstrations were quashed in just a few days. Youth unemployment has more or less hovered around twenty-seven percent since then. The 2013 protests had been the largest since Bashir’s rule began, but today’s are larger and appear to be different. At the very least, the strategies Bashir had typically used successfully to squelch dissent have yet to start working. Furthermore, Ghazi Salaheddine Atabani, once a top advisor to Bashir who left the party after the 2013 protests, recently said, “judged on the basis of what the [current] protests have achieved so far,” there is “a strong belief that things will change and people will triumph.” Bashir could once blame foreign sanctions, but with those gone, he has struggled to explain the country’s dire economic state. The protestors, led by students and other young professionals, only see excuses. The country has an overwhelming young population—61 percent of citizens are under the age of twenty-four. Indeed, the Sudanese Council of Ministers approved a youth empowerment plan last week, which expects to create jobs for over 160,000 young people in the country. During his rallies around the country in the past few weeks, Bashir himself addressed the youth directly when he called upon them for help to build the future of Sudan. Defense Minister Awad Mohamed Ahmed Ibn Auf acknowledged that the current situation in the country showed a schism between young and old and that Sudan “requires intergenerational communication and fair solutions to youth problems and realizing their reasonable ambition.” Prime Minister Moutaz Mousa Abdallah called the protests a "respectable youth movement" and said its voice should be heeded. On February 22, Bashir declared a year-long state of emergency, installing members of the security services as governors and deploying more troops across the country, who continue to use live ammunition against protesters. He also called on parliament to delay the planned amendments to the constitution that would have allowed him to run for another term. Further, his intelligence chief said that Bashir would step down as head of the ruling party and not run in the 2020 election. It appears that the protests could be starting to work.

This week’s alarming developments in Zimbabwe have prompted a curious response from President Emmerson Mnangagwa. A massive popular protest against fuel price increases, fed by broader frustration with an economy crippled by a currency crisis and decades of mismanagement, tipped into violence as security forces responded with a heavy hand, arresting over 600 people, leaving eight dead, and dozens injured. Mnangagwa, who departed for Russia just as the price increase came into effect, delivered his remote response to the turmoil in his country in the form of a tweet sent Wednesday morning—a particularly strange choice given that his government cut internet access countrywide in response to the protests, threatening draconian legal action against service providers who do not comply. From Russia, where he aims to drum up investment—particularly in the diamond mining sector, which is dominated by the Zimbabwean security services—Mnangagwa has plans for additional travel to Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan before heading to Davos. The contrast between his jet-setting investment pitch and media photographs of brutalized Zimbabweans and burning roadblocks is jarring—one wonders what sort of investors are eager to jump into this particular market. However, the substance of his message home is even stranger. He expresses his sadness, sends thoughts and prayers to those affected by violence, and assures readers that he understands their concerns. But if he feels a sense of urgency about the meltdown in his country, or a responsibility to rein in the security services brutalizing civilians, he keeps these feelings well-concealed. Instead, he writes as if violence has been perpetrated only by troublemakers abusing the freedoms he allows—ignoring the fact that the security forces under his control have responded to unarmed protesters with live ammunition, have systematically terrorized people in their homes, and have rounded up activists who have had nothing to do with violence. The head of state assumes the role of passive spectator to the state-sponsored repression and resulting chaos that has his citizens living in fear. In his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in December, Todd Moss of the Center for Global Development noted the Mnangagwa government’s enthusiasm for passive constructions—for example, acknowledging that “citizens died” when in fact innocent citizens were murdered, on camera in some cases, by Zimbabwean soldiers during post-election violence. Moss was onto something. It’s all part of the same leadership style characterized by artful omissions, willful myopia, a failure to take responsibility for the acts committed in the name of the state, and the shedding of crocodile tears.  

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Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering December 30 to January 5, was compiled with support from Rebecca Turkington.

Since the middle of December, something extraordinary has been happening in Sudan. Fed up with crippling inflation, angry about years of economic mismanagement, and unconvinced that needed reforms are likely to come from the architects of the current crisis, the people of Sudan have been demanding change. It began with people rejecting a rise in bread prices, but for many, it has become a rejection of President Omar al-Bashir and his regime. For decades, Bashir and the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) had been able to blame hardships on the West and the international sanctions imposed in response to the government’s gross abuses of its own people. But when the United States lifted its sanctions on Sudan in October 2017, a convenient scapegoat disappeared. Over the past year, the overall state of Sudan’s economy—its $50 billion-plus debt burden, massive spending on security and the machinery of repression, pervasive corruption, and lack of competitiveness—has made it abundantly clear that the relief the Sudanese people seek requires far more than the lifting of sanctions. Sudan needs transformational reforms, and its citizens are demanding nothing less.  The bravery of the Sudanese protesters is astonishing. No one has any doubts about the Bashir regime’s capacity for violent repression; indeed, scores of protestors have been killed over the past month. Equally interesting and instructive is the protesters’ savvy. They know lies when they hear them, and disregard misleading state media reports aimed at discrediting calls for change. They are finding ways to organize and express solidarity even when the state shuts down social media. After nearly thirty years of Bashir’s brutal autocracy, the Sudanese people have developed certain immunities to some of its standard lines of attack. But years of repression have also bred cynicism and distrust that can sour the promise of a different future. Thoughtful Sudanese citizens are concerned about the breakdown in national identity and the absence of a positive and unifying vision for the country that speaks to shared values and aspirations. The change that the Sudanese people seek cannot simply be a rejection of what exists. What is needed is an inclusive vision of a new Sudan, and of its place in the region and in the world. Whether or not Sudanese can find the space to develop those ideas, to give voice to the aspirations of its diverse population, and to cultivate the leaders required to bring them to life, is well worth watching in the months ahead. 

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering October 26 to November 2, was compiled with support from Rebecca Turkington and Ao Yin.