Cairo: “I think my country Sudan has really hit rock bottom.” Those were the last public words uttered by Usamah Mohammad, a 32-year-old Sudanese web developer-turned-citizen journalist, in a video announcing he would join protests against President Omar Al Bashir.
Mohammad, popular under his Twitter handle “simsimt,” was arrested the same day his video was aired. For the next month, his family had no idea where he was. Finally they learned he was in Khartoum’s high security prison and were allowed to visit him last week.
He was skinnier and darker, a sign he had been left to bake in the scorching Khartoum sun, people close to his case say. The family itself is saying nothing.
Mohammad and hundreds of others — no less than 2,000, activists say — have been detained the past month in a campaign unleashed by the Sudanese government. The crackdown aims to crush a new attempt to launch a protest movement calling for the ouster of Al Bashir, inspired by the Middle East’s uprisings that toppled the leaders of Sudan’s neighbours Egypt and Libya as well as Tunisia and Yemen.
Anti-government activists see AlBashir’s 23-year-old regime as the ripest in the region to fall. He has been weakened by the loss of oil-rich South Sudan, which became independent last year after two decades of Africa’s bloodiest civil war. His regime has had to impose painful economic austerity measures to make up for the loss of revenues from the south’s oil, sending inflation up to nearly 40 per cent this month. The years-old rebellion in the western Darfur region continues to bleed the country. Al Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in that region.
“We have more reasons than any other Arab country for an uprising,” said Siddique Tawer, of an opposition umbrella group. “No other country was split. Sudan was. No other country has a civil war ongoing in Darfur and (fighting along the border with the South).”
“These are enough reasons to topple a regime, aside from the corruption, oppression and the rising cost of living,” he said. “The continuation of this regime is dangerous for the rest of the Sudan.”
But those troubles could also prolong the life of Al Bashir’s regime. Sudanese and the region worry of further fragmentation, with separatist movements not only in Darfur but also in the east and in the south.
“What remains of Sudan may not hold as one bloc and may become so unstable it reflects on neighbouring countries,” including South Sudan, said Haj Ali. As a result, regional powers — and the United States, he said — may prefer “to deal with the regime in its current condition and not be embroiled in further crises.”
Khartoum came close to war with South Sudan early this year. With the two sides in torturous negotiations over oil sharing and borders, Al Bashir’s regime can drum up public support with anti-South rhetoric.
Sudan’s crushing economic crisis has given youth groups a tool to galvanize the public behind their protest movement.
After years of a boom fuelled by southern oil, Sudan has reeled since the south’s independence. The crisis is threatening to worsen under austerity measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund to deal with shrinking resources.
Inflation is expected to rise further, electricity bills are going up, and consumer groups are urging a boycott of meat and poultry because of rocketing prices. The currency lost nearly half its value the past year, reaching 4.4 pounds to the dollar officially and six on the black market, according to media reports.
The youth groups, some of them working since 2009, put together a movement through social media and university activism, linking with disgruntled communities of Darfuris and others who live in Khartoum.
On June 16, protests erupted. Female students marched in Khartoum University, were joined by male students, and together they moved into the streets of the capital. Over the next six days, protests broke out at universities in Khartoum and other cities. On the Friday of that week, the strongest day of protests, regular citizens in Khartoum joined, coming out from mosques in marches that numbered several thousand.
“The people demand the downfall of the regime,” some chanted, a refrain heard in other Arab uprisings.
Throughout the week, police struck back with tear gas and rubber bullets and - in at least one case - live ammunition, according to the London-based Sudanese rights group the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies. Several students were seriously injured. Student militias helped security agents in seizing protesters, according to ACJPS. Finally, Khartoum University’s vacation was moved up to prevent more protests.
The movement planned nationwide protests on June 30, coinciding with regime celebrations for the anniversary of Al Bashir’s coming to power. Under a security clampdown, protesters managed only a small turnout. But with so many troops in the streets, anniversary parades were not held.
Mohammad, the web developer, was seized at the Friday protest as he tweeted about arrests by agents of the notorious National Security Services in Khartoum’s Burri district.But friends say he may have been targeted because of his video aired the same day on Al-Jazeera English TV. “After 23 years of oppression and injustice, poverty and crime that are all committed under the current regime, change now is an inevitable must,” he said in the video.
His detention without charge, while others have been freed, shows how the regime sees information about the protests as the biggest threat, said a friend of Mohammad who was held twice in custody, including once for 11 hours without water.
“He is detained for a month, a treatment reserved usually for a ringleader,” the friend said.
Activists report arbitrary arrests of protesters and bloggers and their families in the middle of the night, beatings and humiliation in detention. Two Egyptian female journalists reporting for foreign media amid the unrest were deported.
Some detainees were forced to call fellow activists to arrange meetings that were really sting operations to arrest them. Interrogators threatened to release pictures of women activists wearing revealing clothes to scandalise them in Sudan’s conservative society.
One student told ACJPS that an officer threatened to snap his neck while another scraped off his eyebrows, moustache and hair with a blade. “Now we’ve marked you and if we catch you again protesting we will cut other parts of your body,” they told him.
Two activists face serious criminal charges including inciting violence against the regime. One of them, Rudwan Dawoud, who is married to an American and holds US residency, was labelled a spy and could face the death sentence.
Nagui Moussa — a 26-year old activist from the protest group Girifna, or “We are fed up” — left to Cairo after being detained twice, deciding he was of more use outside spreading information about the protests.
He says protests may have waned — because of both the crackdown and the fasting month of Ramadan — but “people have changed. Why? Because they are seeing the continuous lies of the regime.”
Protests in Khartoum make those in the core of Sudan realise that “the injustice is all over, in the centre as in the periphery.”
“People will see that the one who strikes and tortures in the south, or in Darfur, is the same as the one who strikes and tortures in the north,” he said.
