Abdallah Hamdok, civilian face of the transition, resigned Sunday, believing that the various political forces in the country are too “fragmented” to come out of the crisis.
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He throws in the towel. Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, civilian face of the transition in Sudan, resigned Sunday, January 2, after another murderous day in the country where the generals are now alone in command. As the rumor kept swelling and the local press ensured that he hadn’t come to his office for days, Hamdok threw in the towel on Sunday evening, explaining at length on state television that he had tried everything but having ultimately failed in a country whose “survival” is according to him “threatened” today.
The various political forces of the country which emerged in 2019 from 30 years of the military-Islamist dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir are too “fragmented”, he said, and the civil and military camps too irreconcilable for a “consensus” come “end the bloodshed” and give Sudanese the flagship slogan of the 2019 anti-Bashir revolution: “freedom, peace and justice”. This former UN economist who had obtained the cancellation of Sudan’s debt and his exit from the world ban has not known a moment of respite since the coup d’état of October 25.
That day, his main partner, the army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, had him placed under house arrest in the early hours of the morning. And with him, almost all the civilians of the transitional authorities, brutally breaking the baroque team of 2019. General Burhane extended his de facto mandate at the head of the country by two years and reinstalled Hamdok a month later, all by having previously replaced a good number of officials – in particular within the Sovereignty Council that it oversees – by extracting the most active supporters of civil power.
Immediately Hamdok became the enemy of the streets, the “traitor” who helped the military to “facilitate the return to the old regime”. The demonstrators, who since October 25 have been scolding General Burhane in the street, have started to scold him too. Because in a country almost always under the rule of the army since its independence 65 years ago, the demonstrators proclaim it: they do not want “neither partnership, nor negotiation” with the army. In all, since October 25, 57 protesters have been killed and hundreds injured.