December 2019, acrimonious anniversary for Sudanese revolutionaries

Khartoum, Sudan (PANA) - Sudan’s Minister of Defense Lt Gen. Awad Bin Aouf on 11 April 2019 announced the ouster of President Omar Bashir, ending 30 years of iron fisted one man show.

However, Lieutenant General Ouf himself, and his top brass commanders were equally ousted in less than a week.

The camping revolutionaries insisted these generals were nothing but stooges of Bashir. The generals bowed and moved out.  It was like the dominos effect, a chain reaction nobody anticipated in the Sudan.

At least, nobody anticipated the collapse to be so quick and so dramatic.

The magic word behind all this was the thousands of youth, male and female, who camped peacefully in front of the army headquarters calling for a civilian government.

In August, the same year, a civilian government was sworn in and victory was sealed. But the toll was high. Thousands of Sudanese were either killed, injured, traumatized or went missing. Up till now, nobody knows how many were exactly killed, how many were exactly maimed, how many went nuts and how many went missing.

But between the peak of the revolt that started back in December 2018 and the first anniversary in December 2019, two contrasting  scenes remained particularly vivid in the memories of thousands of civilian Sudanese and scores of journalists who were closely following the developments in the ground.

These two scenes summarize the Sudanese revolution and the price paid.

One was a scene befitting Dante’s Hell in the “Divine Comedy”.  Another was befitting the Brazilian festival of dance and music.

Normally, a revolution starts with death and sacrifices and ends with festivals. It was the other way round in the Sudan. The Sudanese Revolution started with the Brazilian festival and sadly ended with the hell scene. 

On 3 June and the 24 hours that followed were awash with footages of men dressed in military fatigue and high heal robber boots trespassing faces, backs and bellies of young men who were lying on the ground, their hands tied behind their backs.

Another shot shows an elderly man standing with at least six men dressed in military fatigue whipping and beating him up with bamboo-wood batons. He was coming out of his house to bring bread when he came face to face with an unknown group of men dressed in military fatigue.

He stood his ground for two minutes, and then sheer pain and survival instinct made him react. He went onto his knees. The beating stopped. He was thrown on the back of a pickup, with men still kicking him.

A third shot was of a young man, face downwards, with brownish hard rubber boots sullying his head in mud and dirt.

These incidents, mind you, occurred after Bashir was thrown out of power. The young men and women were of the view that Bashir’s hirelings were still there. So they continued camping around the military command. They demanded full cleanup of the military, security, and police and related departments, of all hirelings. It was a teasing situation and provocative for the military mind setup.

This tense situation continued for two months, from 11 April up to 3 June, 2019. On that day, some unknown group of men dressed in military fatigue thought enough was enough. The attack took place in the small hours of 3 June.

Military pick up, thousands of men armed with fire arms, batons, sticks and brutality raided the camps adjacent to the army headquarters using live ammunition, burning tents and literally erasing people who were asleep.

Thousands of men and young women were sleeping inside tents and in the open air in front of the army headquarters in Khartoum. The scenes in front of the army headquarters were nothing but hell, if one could imagine hell.

Retrospectively, just two months before the 3 June massacre, the scene was befitting that French revolution as was drawn by Victor Hugo in “Notre Dame de Paris”, about the French Revolution and the ambiance of joviality, camaraderie and youthfulness.

It was a flourishing community of young men and women singing, dancing, drawing, coloring each other’s faces, and camping in peaceful expression of revolution against the regime.

Food was shared, women brought hot drinks, soup, cake and their children to share the food with the youth and to witness an event that occurs only once in generation.

The areas surrounding the army headquarters, the asphalt, the walls, the terraces, were all turned vivid with paintings, colorful paintings of those who martyred since 2013 when over 200 were killed in the first open protest against Bashir.

The drawings were equally of those missing, those still in detention, and those who spent weeks away from their families guarding the revolutionaries, those who resisted arrest, those singing, those cooking food and preparing tea and coffee for free to all revolutionaries.

The four colors of the Sudanese flag, red-white-green-black, were vibrantly dominating and smiling in the face of the visitors.

All this youthfulness and life celebrating were turned into smoke, gutted steel, clothes, shoes left behind, suffocating plastic smell and wailing, wailing, wailing of bereaved families, hurt women and crushed men.

The outcome was cleaning the area around the military command but the toll was unimaginable.  Unspecified number of young men and women went missing. Footage of decomposed drowned bodies recovered about 20 miles along the course of the river Nile, northwards, from the scene of the camp  were everywhere in the social media.

The first anniversary of the revolution was dim. There was little fanfare; on the contrary, it was a low profile event. 

The Attorney General of the Republic of Sudan, Taj Alsir Alhibir, was faced with the intricate legacy of the Bashir era, fighting in all directions to do justice to those harmed by the defunct regime and to restore billions of stolen government money.

In a statement marking the first anniversary (19 December 2018) of the outbreak of the mass protests that eventually removed Bashir from power, Alhibir told a Sudanese online magazine (sudanow) that his “office is keen and committed to question all the perpetrators of violations and all who spilled the blood of the revolution martyrs and bring them to justice”.

“When you see who was being brought to court of law, and who is being questioned and interrogated and in a few months when the commission set to probe the killing comes out with its finding and justice is served, the next celebration will no doubt be joyfully crimson."

it concluded that "for sure, this year’s celebration was acrimonious, marred by tears and fears of setback but interwoven with hope for a better future and a free present. Hope paves the way for realizing aspirations”. The same paper has commented on the December 2019 sad anniversary celebration. 

 

-0-    PANA      MO/RA    24Dec2019