Violence erupted in Khartoum as authorities blocked telecommunications just before a large-scale protest against the military. Sudanese security forces fire tear gas canisters to repel the thousands of opponents who approach the presidential palace on Saturday, December 25. The crowd, now a few dozen meters from the palace where the transitional authorities headed by General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhane, author of the coup d’état carried out on October 25, are seated, advance and retreat at the discretion of the police.
Each of them, new wounded are evacuated by demonstrators, noted an AFP journalist on the spot. Barrages of tear gas canisters also await protesters who try to cross the bridges connecting its suburbs to Khartoum.
In anticipation of this demonstration, from the early hours of the day, the mobile internet was cut, then telephone communications no longer worked. “Freedom of expression is a fundamental right and this includes full access to the internet”, protested the UN envoy, Volker Perthes, recalling that “no one should be arrested for having intended to demonstrate”, while activists report raids since Friday evening in their ranks.
The demonstrators, in number – tens of thousands in Khartoum, in its suburbs, but also in Madani, 150 kilometers south of the capital, Atbara (north) and Port Sudan (east) – conspire the army , its leader, Burhane and even the civilian prime minister, Abdallah Hamdok. After the military putsch, the latter had regained his post by agreeing to recognize the post-putsch state of affairs and therefore the extension of General Burhane’s mandate at the head of the country for two years. Sudan still does not have a government, which is blocking the resumption of international aid, vital for this country, one of the poorest in the world.
Fearing a new outbreak of violence, the pro-democracy doctors’ union which has identified the victims of the repression since 2018 said “ask the world to watch what’s going to happen.” Less than a week ago, on the occasion of an event organized for the third anniversary of the launch of the “revolution” 2018, which forced the army to end 30 years of the military-Islamist dictatorship of Omar Al-Bashir, the security forces fired live ammunition and rained tear gas canisters on hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. The next day, the security forces dispersed with batons the thousands of protesters who participated in an “unlimited sit-in”, the modus operandi of the “revolution” which overthrew Bashir in 2019 in front of the presidential palace.