(Dakar) Senegal remains under tension on Saturday following clashes that left six new dead, bringing the death toll to 15 since Thursday and the two-year prison sentence for opponent Ousmane Sonko.
“On June 2, six deaths were recorded, including four in the Dakar region and two in the Ziguinchor region,” the spokesman for the Minister of the Interior told AFP.
Clashes opposed Friday evening small groups of very mobile young demonstrators to the police in Dakar, in the suburbs of the capital and in the south of the country. No incident had been reported by the Interior Ministry on Saturday afternoon.
The United States said on Saturday it was “concerned and saddened” by the violence that has shaken Senegal since Thursday and called for a return to calm.
On Friday, the international community, representatives of associations and soccer stars like star striker Sadio Mané called for restraint and an end to the violence in this country deemed to be a rare island of stability in West Africa.
Many public and private properties were ransacked, including banks and Auchan stores in the suburbs of Dakar. Burned tires and stones littered the roadway of several streets on Saturday morning.
PHOTO LEO CORREA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Riot police fire tear gas at protesters during a protest in a neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal, Friday, June 2, 2023.
Several social networks, such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter, are cut, a government measure to stop, according to him, “the dissemination of hateful and subversive messages”.
The army deployed, as the day before, around strategic points. Police and gendarmes are also present in large numbers in the capital.
” Resistance ”
The Senegalese hold their breath in fear of an arrest of the opponent Ousmane Sonko, declared presidential candidate of 2024, and sentenced Thursday to two years in prison for having pushed to “debauchery” a young woman under 21 years old.
PHOTO COOPER INVEEN, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Ousmane Sonko
This decision makes him ineligible for the time being. Mr. Sonko has been shouting since the beginning of the affair at a plot by President Macky Sall to eliminate him politically.
He says he is “held” in his residence in Dakar by security forces who prevent anyone from approaching.
Mr. Sonko can now be arrested “at any time”, said Minister of Justice Ismaïla Madior Fall.
His party, the Pastef, called “to amplify and intensify the resistance […] until the departure of President Macky Sall”, whose regime he accuses “of bloody and dictatorial excesses” on Friday in a press release.
For the government spokesperson, the events since Thursday are not “a popular demonstration with political demands”, but rather “acts of vandalism and banditry”.
“We are faced with thugs recruited to maintain an artificial tension. They will continue to do their job, but time is on the side of full recovery and the maintenance of public order,” he told the newspaper. The Observer.
Fear
“I’m really scared because we don’t know how this is all going to end. But it was quite predictable, and perhaps we had to go through it for things to move, for politicians to stop playing with the people, “said Fatou Ba, a 46-year-old shopkeeper, to AFP. years in the popular district of Dalifort, in Dakar.
” Whether [les autorités] want peace, they won’t go looking for Sonko,” she hopes.
“No one is safe in this country right now. If the protests continue, life will be even more difficult,” said Matar Thione, a 32-year-old motorcycle driver.
In this district, the few service stations open are stormed for fear of a shortage of gasoline. Dakar, usually teeming, is emptied and many businesses are closed.