Sudan's Unfinished Democracy

The Promise and Betrayal of a People's Revolution

Willow Berridge ,Justin Lynch ,Raga Makawi ,Alex de Waal

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781787388475
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book tells the story of the Sudanese revolution of 2019; of how it succeeded in bringing down the long-standing rule of President Omar al-Bashir; and of the troubled transitional civilian-led government that was installed in his place. It sets the scrupulously non-violent uprising in its historical context, showing how the protesters drew upon the precedents of earlier civic revolutions and adapted their practices to the challenges of the al-Bashir regime. The book also explores how that regime was brought to its knees through its inability to manage the intersecting economic and political crises caused by the secession of South Sudan and the loss of oil revenue, alongside the uncontrolled expansion of a sprawling security apparatus.

The civilian protesters called for-and expected-a total transformation of Sudanese politics, but they found themselves grappling with a still-dominant cabal of generals, who had powerful regional backers and a strong hold over the economy. Internally divided, and faced with a deepening economic crisis, the civilian government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has found itself in office, but with less and less real power, unable to change the conduct of political business as usual.

1

FREEDOM AND CHANGE

Samahir Mubarak walked through the empty streets of Khartoum and was crestfallen. She thought she would be marching against the regime of Omar al-Bashir alongside a million people. Instead, she wandered alone. She watched a boy kick up dirt as he walked to the middle of the road. It was 6 April 2019.

Samahir is an emblem of those who brought revolution to Sudan in the twenty-first century. Educated, female, young and devoted to a cosmopolitan civic ideal of what her country could be, she personifies everything that the authoritarian regime of al-Bashir was trying to repress. She was a dedicated member of the pharmacists’ union and a spokesperson for the Sudan Professionals Association (SPA), which was organising protests against the government in Khartoum and other major cities. The extent to which people like Samahir represented the Sudanese people as a whole, and instigated the Sudanese revolution, is a question to which we will return. Ever since al-Bashir had seized power 30 years earlier, as the front man of an Islamist military junta, there had been armed and unarmed resistance, but the 2019 demonstrations carried with them a more tangible sense than before that real change was within grasp.

The boy in the middle of the road inhaled sharply and yelled, ‘Freedom, peace, justice!’ Samahir looked around, hoping it was a signal. The boy shouted again. Still, nothing happened. Samahir wondered if the resistance had been broken; whether the protests had dissipated, like so many before. Perhaps Sudan was trapped. Then the boy shouted a third time: ‘Freedom, peace, justice!’

Protestors emptied out of their homes and flooded the streets. Women tilted their heads and howled up at Khartoum’s cloudless April skies. It was the hottest time of the year. ‘Madaniyya!’ they chanted—a word signifying the values of civilian rule, dignity and democracy, perhaps best translated as ‘civicness’. It was a rallying call for the resistance, along with ‘Tasgut, bas!’, which meant ‘Just fall!’—the demand that the ugly, ageing kleptocrat in army uniform who had ruled the country for a generation should depart. ‘Down with the rule of thieves!’, they shouted. Well over half Sudan’s population had been born since 1989. Only those aged over 51 actually had the chance to vote in an election that mattered, meaning that the political leaders active during Sudan’s previous democratic experiment were now into the typical age of retirement. The protestors wanted the regime swept away, after which—they dreamed—anything would be possible.

Young men crooned back, waving their arms in the air. Samahir joined this crowd. If the chanting had not been so loud she would have heard the thuds of sandals trudging in the streets, a sound that promised freedom. Samahir let the current of people carry her to the centre of the inflection point of Sudan’s revolution. She ended up outside military headquarters where hundreds of thousands of people were congregating in what would be called the ‘sit-in’, an encampment at the army headquarters in central Khartoum that was both a direct challenge to the military kleptocrats and also a living expression of the protestors’ ideals for a transformed Sudan.

The military headquarters wasn’t the formal seat of state power. The Republican Palace lay a further two miles away—an elegant but fading colonial-era building whose doors opened right onto the corniche of the Blue Nile, next to a new Chinese-built extravaganza, whose ceilings were so high they made even the most egotistical person feel diminutive. Visiting heads of state would drive to this twin palace, their police-escorted motorcades bringing the city centre to a halt. But real power was exercised from within the vast pharaonic compound of the military headquarters where coercion was directed and cash handed out—and where the fate of Sudan was ultimately decided. The headquarters was dominated by three hulking office blocks, one square, one supposedly shaped to resemble a ship, the third resembling a rather squat aeroplane. Adjacent were buildings hidden behind a thick wall that hid the nerve centre of the security and intelligence services. Inside the walls was cramped, with a mini-city of its own shops, banks, fuel stations and offices. Tucked inside was also a portly house that was al-Bashir’s private residence and political office, where twice weekly he held an open house for commissioned military officers and sundry other well-connected petitioners. The protestors had chosen correctly. The compound was ringed by a wall with mock battlements and Ottoman-style gatehouses. It couldn’t withstand a real siege. And the army wasn’t prepared for a civic siege either.

The story of how protestors like Samahir overthrew al-Bashir is both a distinctively Sudanese playbook for how to overthrow a reviled regime, and also a version of a widely followed script for non-violent protest movements reprised around the world. The heart of the movement was the SPA, a gathering of trade unions that initially had more modest aims—mainly, better wages. The SPA took on the role of coordinating a flourishing network of neighbourhood resistance committees, already established or rapidly coming into being and sharing non-violent methods and democratic ideals, united by their determination to bring down al-Bashir, his cabal and cronies. Each resistance committee was a collection of 20 to 50 people in a neighbourhood, mostly young, which acted similar to a social club.¹ Many of the SPA leaders were in the diaspora, with networks and skills that proved essential to the resistance, but by the same token less well placed for the challenges that followed. Sudan’s civic revolutionaries were ill-prepared for the state power that suddenly fell within their grasp. ‘Tasgut, bas!’ was fit for purpose, but a limited purpose only. The palpable energy of people’s power seemed to promise that anything was possible.

It was not just idealism that powered the uprising. There was also deprivation and hunger. The booming economy of the first decade of the 2000s, when Sudan was pumping oil, had collapsed into chaotic austerity. Inflation was high, jobs were fewer, fuel and bread were becoming scarce. The army devoured most of the national budget. Critics on the left decried the ‘deep state’: the network of security men, business godfathers and their cronies that wielded real power.²

In the two and a half years since the April 2019 revolution, the structural problems of Sudan’s political economy remain. The economic crisis has deepened. Sudanese politics still functions as a competitive marketplace in which those skilled in political horse-trading can turn the turbulence of events to their advantage. Democratic institution building has been diluted by encounters with transactional politics and empty state coffers. The inequalities of wealth and political influence, long shaped by geography and skin colour, could not be swept aside so easily despite revolutionary chants in solidarity with a more unified Sudan and against the centre’s exclusionary ethnic politics: ‘You arrogant racist—all the country is Darfur!’ Some of Sudan’s civic revolutionaries bemoan the missed opportunities, accusing their colleagues of betraying their ideals; others concede that their aspirations were unrealistic and the challenges too great. At the time of writing the flame of democracy in Sudan is flickering.

How the Revolution Began

The main act of the Sudanese revolution is the confrontation between the civic uprising and al-Bashir: the people facing a tyrant. Since he came to power in 1989, few Sudanese liked al-Bashir or were ready to sacrifice for him—many loathed him, the greedy and cruel men around him, and the apparatus they had built. But dissatisfaction does not make a revolution. Rather, the story of Sudan’s civil uprising is the tale of how that anger and resentment were organised into coalitions and mobilised into collective action. The demonstrations, organised with local groups that sprang up neighbourhood by neighbourhood, rapidly came to be coordinated by the SPA, which bottled the demand for change and repackaged it into a structure that could topple a dictator. The SPA did not begin Sudan’s revolution and has never claimed ownership over it. Instead, the group shepherded change by being the most prominent body that organised protests. The story of Sudan’s civic uprising starts from humble roots. Protestors were deeply passionate about the transformation they envisaged. Others backed the uprising but with a note of caution—they had seen this script before, and it had not ended well. In Chapter 5 of this book we turn from an account of the events of 2018–21 to a historical and comparative perspective, including showing how the exemplary civic uprisings of 1964 and 1985 had raised high hopes, but had then disappointed.

Al-Bashir was a chameleon dictator. While he stayed close to his oldest friends in the army throughout his three decades in power, his shades of Islamist green shifted over the years, and his alliances changed dramatically.³ Unlike most long-standing autocrats, al-Bashir never succeeded in cultivating a cult of personality—on the few occasions on which he tried to do so the efforts were widely ridiculed. He made few public speeches. Campaign posters for the elections of 2010 showed airbrushed images of the president in a variety of costumes, looking far younger than his age, and invited humorous debunking. Just as significantly, al-Bashir was well aware of the limits of his power and only in his final days did he succumb to hubristic miscalculation. For the first ten years (1989–99) al-Bashir was in office but the Islamist movement headed by Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi set the political agenda.⁴ The Islamists even ran their own foreign policy for six years, until their entanglement in terrorism became an imminent threat to the regime, and al-Bashir began to assert some control—the beginnings of his accumulation of real power. In 1997–99 al-Turabi tried to reduce the president to a figurehead and almost succeeded, until at the last moment the apparently cornered al-Bashir played his highest card: he declared a state of emergency and dismissed his rival.⁵ Over the next six years, al-Bashir consolidated executive power in his office, but the strategic decisions over the future of the country—the formula contained in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA)—were made by Vice President Ali Osman Taha, al-Turabi’s former deputy. During the six years that followed the CPA, of cohabitation with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), al-Bashir both accumulated power and dispersed institutional authority, in the classic manner of a ‘big tent’ patrimonial leader. And his final eight years were consumed with power-politicking as the bill for the previous years’ blunders became due.

Al-Bashir and his cabal of soldiers and security men began and ended their years in power on the same note. When they and the civilian Islamists mounted their coup in June 1989—calling it the ‘National Salvation Revolution’—they saw their main threat as organised civil society. Their first and most ruthless steps were to ban and dismantle independent trade unions and professional associations, sending many of their leaders to infamous ‘ghost houses’ and others into exile.⁶ In their place the Islamists created new associations for lawyers, teachers, doctors, engineers and others, under the same names, but run entirely by their own cadres.⁷ It was a façade of civil society that aimed over the years to become all-pervasive, a hegemonic project known as al tamkeen, and an attempt to abolish any form of organised resistance.⁸ The unions with real constituencies went underground and operated in secret. They continued to mobilise against the new regime’s price hikes and reduction of the minimum wage, but were violently repressed.⁹ After the 2005 CPA and the unbanning of political parties, these individuals came out into the open once again, but their former organisations struggled to compete against the regime-sanctioned unions and associations. But the quasi-liberalisation of the CPA’s interim period was dialled back as soon as South Sudan’s independence approached.

Scarcely noticed at the time, popular protests erupted in northern cities during the week of the referendum in southern Sudan in January 2011. After 55 years of second-class status within a united Sudan, southern Sudanese voted for independence. It was a humiliation for the leadership and a crippling economic blow, as the south took with it three-quarters of the country’s oil. Al-Bashir and his security chiefs feared that the recriminations over the loss of the south and the economic shock from the loss of oil revenue spelled a crisis in Khartoum. Moreover, civic uprisings were bringing down the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt during those very weeks. The Sudanese leadership saw off the protests¹⁰ but, in doing so, it continued running the economy as if they were still an oil-rich country and kept the subsidies of wheat and fuel untouched.

The seeds of the SPA were planted around November 2011 when opposition politicians and underground union leaders decided to unify some of the labour groups.¹¹ The idea was based on the historical power that unions once had and the knowledge that, if they formed an alliance, it would be mutually beneficial. Their goals were specific to boosting wages and labour rights. Doctors could combine forces with teachers and make each other’s protests stronger. Some say the first key moment of the modern SPA was a small protest in 2012 outside a government ministry.¹² Ahmed Rabie, a teacher, was one of six people to show up at the protest. The government hadn’t faced these kinds of protests since the mid-1990s, but it had the apparatus for repression well prepared. The National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) had studied the way in which civic leaders in Tunisia and Egypt had mobilised using social media. Based on this research, the security men had caught up with the protestors’ tactics. They also used the same old methods of arrest, detention, torture, and threat of disappearance.

Rabie and the six activists were brave but not suicidal. They rushed out of a van, snapped a photo with signs demanding better pay, and then scurried back into the vehicle. A lot of the early protests were like that: lonely, small, forgotten.

After the protest in 2012, the collective of unions didn’t have a name but it continued coordinating for workers’ rights. There was no leader. The structure was a coalition of six groups: lawyers, doctors, professors, engineers, teachers and journalists. Each of the six unions had two representatives in a council, who then voted for six to eight members of a secretariat who executed the decisions of the council. The consensus-based approach worked because issues were uncontroversial and mostly centred around when to call a protest. The alliance remained underground out of a fear of infiltration by agents from NISS.

Autocrats commonly trade repression against welfare—the classic ‘bread and circuses’ strategy. In 2010, al-Bashir’s electoral message could have been distilled to, ‘Forget my early years of human rights violations, remember only the prosperity brought by oil.’ In the years after Sudan began exporting oil in 1999, the national budget grew by a factor of 13. Khartoum and the main cities benefited from a boom in construction, consumption and employment. The boom couldn’t last, and neither could the political strategy built on it. When South Sudan seceded, the government had to tighten its belt. Al-Bashir knew the likely consequences so he prevaricated as long as he could.¹³

In September 2013, the government introduced its first round of austerity measures. As expected, the usual suspects—students and youth groups, unions and professional associations—mounted protests. The NISS was well prepared with the ingredients for turning political protest into general mayhem. One tactic was inserting agents provocateurs among the protestors, who turned to smashing shop windows and burning petrol stations, prompting many urbanites to have misgivings. Another tactic took advantage of young people’s naïve over-confidence in social media, which allowed security agents to spread deadly disinformation. The demonstrations were put down with lethal force, with more than 200 people killed.¹⁴

Failure can be a better teacher than success. Five years later, NISS used the same tactics, but the SPA had learned its lesson. The SPA leaders took the errors of 2013 as a cautionary tale: they mourned the human toll and regretted the blind alley of rioting. They didn’t want to send young men and women to their deaths without anything to show for it.¹⁵

The early years of the still-unnamed labour collective were more of an ad hoc alliance than a revolutionary organisation. Progress happened in fits and starts. The group organised small protests for years where perhaps a dozen people would show up. Arrests of union members and leaders were common. ‘We had a lot of difficulties getting organised,’ said Mohamed Yousif, a professor and influential member in the group. Yousif was a wizened old man with grey hair sprouting in every which direction—perhaps one for each protest he’d taken part in. He had formerly been a member of the SPLM and had played a role in the campaign to vote al-Bashir out of office in the 2010 elections, an effort that foundered as much on opposition infighting as on the resolve of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) that it wouldn’t yield. He said, ‘People would disappear.’ But the labour groups slowly rebuilt and refined their tactics. History will remember the SPA for its role in deposing al-Bashir, but this wouldn’t have been possible without those years of trial and error. The body learned that the more specific and immediate an issue the more traction the group received. Low pay and corruption attracted support. Abstract ideas like justice did not unify as many people.

The government had put itself in a trap of raised expectations. It had used the windfall from oil to put more than a million people on the government payroll, spend lavishly on construction contracts, import cheap consumer goods, and entrench a system of patronage politics that was expensive beyond Sudan’s means.¹⁶ Instead of using the short-lived oil revenues to build a sustainable economy around farming and manufacturing, the NCP (and equally, its partner in kleptocracy, the SPLM) squandered the money. Most fatally for its own political prospects, Sudan’s ruling party racked up an impossible bill for fuel and food subsidies. Like a reckless drug dealer, it got high on its own supply. It begged, borrowed and stole to feed its habit. And the vanities of al-Bashir and his system were exposed, one by one.

By 2018, Sud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Maps
• 1. Freedom and Change
• 2. Reaping the Whirlwind: The Fall of al-Bashir
• 3. Counter-revolution and Compromise
• 4. Political Business as Usual
• 5. More than History Repeating Itself
• 6. Not the Last Chapter
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover