by La Voz San Francisco
Millions of ordinary people in various parts of the world – Algeria, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, France, Sudan – are taking the reins of history in a global revolutionary wave targeting authoritarian and exploitative states.
The revolution in Sudan is a renewal of the revolutionary wave since the Arab Spring, that inspiring uprising that began in 2010 against the repressive regimes of North Africa and the Middle East. The conditions that gave rise to the Arab Spring continue to generate new ruptures, led by the Sudanese and Algerian people, who’ve swept their respective dictators from power.
These struggles face off against the geopolitical designs of the region’s superpowers. Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, France, China, seek to control the region in order to effectively exploit its natural resources and hold strategic military positions, and will respond with repression and cooptation in an attempt to regain control. The outcome of this inspiring movement will influence the dynamics of the global class struggle in the years to come.
How Did it Begin?
The tripling of the cost of bread in December lit the spark of rebellion in Sudan. This backlash against increases to the cost of living quickly widened into a political struggle against Omar al-Bashir, who took political power thirty years earlier under a coup d’état in the context of one of Sudan’s bloody interethnic – and imperialist driven- civil wars. In 2011, at the end of the civil war between northern and southern Sudanese, South Sudan gained independence, taking three-quarters of Sudan’s petroleum reserves. In response to this loss in oil profits, al-Bashir cut social services and increased the cost of living, sparking an intense round of resistance at the end of 2018.
According to participants, the uprising began in the small town of Atbara, where a student’s inability to buy bread after school led to a series of protests and riots against rising prices. The protests quickly expanded nationwide and made al-Bashir their target. In response, al-Bashir declared a state of emergency in late February, removing the existing government power and replacing it with members of his own security services. As he’d done before, he promised to remove himself from power, this time after the April 2020 elections, which the people rejected.
Protesters built a sit-in at military headquarters in Khartoum in early April, where the military and security forces fought each other sporadically, the former on the side of the protesters, the latter on the side of the regime. On April 11th, the military staged a coup to remove al-Bashir from power and rebranded itself as the Transitional Military Council (TMC). The military, under Saudi and Emirati pressure to remove al-Bashir, never actually ceded or intended to cede power to a democratic state.
Immediately, the military brought Awad Ibn Auf, a general who played a central role in the criminal war against Darfur in east Sudan, to power and imposed a curfew law. Protesters, led by the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), responded with a non-violent sit-in outside of the ministry of defense, forcing Ibn Auf from power after only one day in office. The sit-in took on a celebratory feeling, with hip-hop music blaring from speakers, dancing, and chanting slogans such as “either a civilian power structure, or we implant ourselves here eternally”; activists reorganized social life within the sit-in, taking care of people’s needs in a festive, democratic, militant atmosphere. The military replaced Ibn Auf with General Burhan, whom many protesters accepted after he promised to respect the sit-in and indict former military generals. Burhan has no direct links to Islamism and was a leading officer in the Sudanese units that fought alongside Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as ‘Hemedti’, heads the Rapid Support Forces – the military’s shock troops who were born out of the state’s war with Darfur – and is a leading figure in the TMC.
Counter-revolutionary Geopolitics
Burhan has since then met with Egyptian and Saudi leaders to promise to support them against regional rivals Turkey and Qatar, to continue Sudan’s participation in the Saudi-led war against Iran-backed rebels in Yemen, securing three billion dollars to consolidate the military’s internal power. Egypt’s and Saudi Arabia’s interests lie in supporting Burhan against al-Bashir and Ibn Auf – both tied to Islamic fundamentalism, which the Saudis and Egyptians want to defeat in the region -, consolidating an authoritarian network of Gulf-North African states and extending their rule through the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. The Saudi/Emirati v Qatari/Turkey fight centers around control of the Horn of Africa, a region the U.S. has deprioritized as its diverts resources to face its Russian and Chinese rivals. The Sudanese military is moving to consolidate nationwide control and favorable relations with the Saudi-Emirati bloc.
The Sudanese learned from the Arab Spring that they cannot trust the military to improve their social or political conditions. In Egypt, the fall of Mubarak led to Egyptians ending their protests and vacating their squares. During the elections that followed, the Muslim Brotherhood – the predominant Islamist political force in the region – won, coopting and quelling the Egyptian mass movement by spreading illusions in the democratic nature of the military. The Egyptian military, led by Sisi, violently removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power and reasserted control over the nation. The military’s crackdown on the Brotherhood was brutal, including the massacre of hundreds of its supporters at the Raba’a al-Adawiya and Nahda Squares in Cairo in August 2013.
The Sudanese people, on the other hand, remain in the streets after the fall of al-Bashir, Ibn Auf, and after the deal signed by the FFC and the TMC in late July. They demand nothing less than the complete removal of the military, denounce imperialism’s behind-the-scenes designs, and reject the TMC’s attempt to coopt through ethnic fragmentation. This signifies an acute awareness of political dynamics in the region and a leap in revolutionary consciousness.
One critical component of the process of revolution and counterrevolution in the Arab world lies with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), a diffuse network of Islamic fundamentalist militants. The MB represent the Islamist pole of counterrevolution and reaction, at times working alongside, other times challenging, its military pole in the region. The organization’s support for electoral participation and activism place them at odds with the autocratic Gulf states – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in particular, and their military allies in North Africa – Egypt, Libya, and Sudan.
In Syria, a democratic protest movement against Assad turned into one of the 21st century’s worst conflicts, with Islamist forces aligning themselves against Assad- and his backers Russia and Iran – in a bloody civil war that crushed the liberatory aspirations of millions of ordinary Syrians. In Libya too, a brief democratic opening after the fall of Gaddafi came apart as a military strongman, supported by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), clashed with Islamist forces in a struggle for state power. The civil wars produced by this conflict have, momentarily, drowned the people’s fight for democracy and justice in these nations.
Today, the Sudanese case complexifies the relationship between Islamism and military rule. In 1989, Omar al-Bashir gained power via a military coup which the National Islamic Front (NIF) supported, beginning an alliance unusual for the region. The NIF morphed into the National Congress Party (NCP) in 1998, the dominant party during Sudan’s internal civil wars, a party far more interested in state power today than in implementing an ideological program.
Al-Bashir began marginalizing the radical Islamist wing of the NCP in search of a more pragmatic, less ideological state network with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In the aftermath of al-Bashir – and the NCP’s – fall from power, the military accused the NCP of orchestrating a coup to regain power in late July. The NCP rejects the accusation, for which scores of their supporters have been arrested – a move which the FFC leadership in power today supports.
Even as the Islamists no longer sit at the center of power, their historical collusion with al-Bashir and the Sudanese military delegitimize them, in protesters’ eyes, as an alternative to military rule. In early April, for instance, Sudanese protesters shut down a conference of the National Congress Party, declaring that, in Sudan, “there was no space for Islamists[1].”This absence of Islamism in the protest movement, along with the collective experience of the Arab Spring, provides fertile ground for the development of a liberatory, working-class vision for the revolution.
The Protest Leadership
The Forces for Freedom and Change – composed of legal workers’ organizations, the Sudanese Communist Party, liberal democrats, armed rebel groups formed in the heat of the fight against al-Bashir to provide direction and coordination. It is dominated by an urban, primarily Arab, Khartoum-based group of professional workers, in a country deeply divided ethnically, geographically, politically, and economically. The process by which demands are articulated, how the FFC conducts negotiations, and how it decides to respond to pressure from the military are all key elements a revolutionary strategy will need to address. To be more specific: how will this movement weave together the various participants across Sudan, including Arabs and non-Arabs, women and men, the cities with the provinces, students and workers, the protest movement and the soldiers, among others, in order to present the strongest united front to the ruling class? It appears unlikely that the FFC as it exists, encompassing groups such as the SCP that emphasize negotiation and others, such as the Umma Party, that call for ending the street protests, will be able to carry out the revolution’s most urgent tasks: the consolidation and reinforcement of the grassroots neighborhood councils, unity with rank-and-file soldiers, and political spaces to develop a common program for the struggle.
The movement has demonstrated a tendency towards unity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics from the state. When the TMC attempted to blame Darfurian university students for planning ‘terrorist’ activity and targeting protesters, the people chanted “We are all Darfur!”. Still, the pull of ethnic politics remains strong as the TMC holds significant control in rural areas through promises of ethnic representation and material hand-outs with tribal strongmen. The FFC’s urban, cosmopolitan, leadership acts as a barrier to bridging the urban-rural divide which a successful struggle against the military in Sudan requires.
Much has also been said about the role of women in the revolution. Women have been on the frontlines in barricades, marches, and sit-ins, they’ve led chants, fed the movement, healed the injured, and coordinated the movement’s activities. There a feminist tendency in this revolution, and one which will require conscious development of by revolutionaries, particularly in the face of reactionary and conciliatory forces that seek to maintain the status quo or compromise with the miiltary. The advance of this feminist trend within the revolution is a marker, as in all revolutions, of the strength and liberatory potential of a revolution. In 2009, Sudanese women protested against “public morality laws” passed by the government in which women’s clothing and public conduct were monitored and controlled by the state; this current round of rebellion has amplified this fight, and provides fertile ground for its growth, including the formation of self-defense groups against sexual violence, feminist political education, and the socialization of the movement’s reproductive labor, still disproportionately carried by women.
Repression and Resistance
On June 3rd, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Hemedti, brutally attacked the protest encampment at the military headquarters in Khartoum. They shot, beat, tortured, disappeared, and scarred hundreds of protesters. In response, the FFC called for a nationwide general strike, to which Sudanese workers responded energetically and in mass. Workers in Khartoum, Omdurman, Port Sudan as well as in smaller towns and rural areas closed down hospitals, schools, airports, seaports, government agencies, and petrol stations. The RSF, perpetrators of genocidal activities in Darfur, attacked and shot at strikers in an attempt to intimidate them and break their strike. Yet the strikers did not back down.
The Sudanese people will not accept anything less than a complete removal of the military. Not only does the resistance face a violent and repressive state apparatus, but also a protest leadership with a clear tendency towards compromise with that state. The response to this comes from the neighborhood councils that the Sudanese have created to coordinate their struggle independently of the FFC. These councils organize barricades, disseminate information, break the internet blockade, feed the movement, and keep the movement on its toes, ready to act. These are the popular organs which, if coordinated on a nationwide level under a common program, can begin to form a revolutionary counter-state to that of the TMC. The fate of the revolution lies in their hands and in our international solidarity – the Sudanese diaspora’s technological and financial support, along with protests, have been indispensable.
The threat of chaos and civil war in revolutions is always present. This possibility, however, although stoked by the TMC to demobilize protesters, is not inevitable. Sudan’s revolution is well positioned among the revolutions of the Arab Spring to avoid civil war given the relative political coherence of its movement around one fundamental point of unity: a completely civilian, non-military, democratic government. Towards this end, they’ve refused to accept concessions from al-Bashir nor any of the predecessors proposed by the new military government that ousted him. Yet, the best defense against civil war lies in taking the offensive, in particular uniting with revolutionary troops and strengthening the movement’s support in rural Sudan.
The gains of the Sudanese revolution: ousting al-Bashir after three decades in power, building a nationwide revolutionary network, weathering repression, forcing negotiations on the military, are the fruits of the Sudanese people’s courage, commitment, and creativity. No official leadership or savior could have accomplished what millions of determined organizers did. As the counterrevolution prepares itself to block any further gains from the revolution, we must learn from and support the efforts of Sudanese activists as they continue their struggle. The new ‘sovereign council’, fruit of an undemocratic compromise between the FFC and the TMC (with the African Union, alongside various world diplomats, including from the U.S., jockeying for influence) in which the latter retains 50% representation, will become the body tasked with repressing and exploiting the Sudanese people; the urgent challenge for socialists lies in supporting the grassroots protest movement to move beyond the limits imposed by the new state. The revolutionary masses, as Sudan demonstrates, can shape the contours of world politics and open the possibility of a new revolutionary epoch.
[1] https://www.apnews.com/cf6991bc0f184566b55bc66145507a0f