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Sudan students continue to hold major protests
July 16, 2012
Sudanese university students armed with sticks and stones have staged perhaps their largest protest since unrest sparked by inflation began nearly a month ago, a witness said.
Security forces fired tear gas, said the witness, adding the students at the University of Khartoum were shouting and throwing stones after the protest began mid-afternoon last Wednesday.
“Compared to other demonstrations it’s… bigger,” said the witness who asked not to be identified.
With protesters scattered around the central campus, it was hard to determine their numbers, the witness said.
The university is where an unprecedented month of national protests began on June 16, when students first voiced their opposition to high food prices.
Police attack mosque full of people in Sudan
July 13, 2012
More than 30 people were arrested on Friday when police fired tear gas at a mosque which has become a focus of Arab Spring-style protests in Sudan, a senior opposition figure said.
About 200 people were left inside the besieged Wad Nubawi mosque after many others fled from the tear gas, said Mariam al-Mahdi, a politbureau member of the Umma party linked to the mosque in Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman.
“They hit them massively with the nerve gas,” said Mahdi, daughter of former prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi who leads the party. There were “many casualties” because people were suffocating from the fumes.
The remaining group of 200 were later “beaten out” of the mosque, she said.
Security forces have responded with increasingly aggressive tactics, using gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition mostly fired into the air, since June 22 when small demonstrations began at the mosque after Friday prayers, she told AFP in an interview this week.
Arab Spring stretches to Sudan amidst new waves of protests
July 04, 2012
While the Egyptians were celebrating the declaration of the name of the first elected president in their history, the young Sudanese were launching their protest against Omar Bashir’s government because of its decision to cut fuel subsidies as part of wider economic austerity measures to rescue the country from chronic economic crisis.
The protest first erupted in an impoverished eastern province before reaching some parts of the capital including Khartoum University. As all other Arab regimes have done, Omar al-Bashir’s ordered the police to crack down on the protesters using teargas and batons along with widescale arrest of the protesters as well as some opposition figures.
Similarly, al-Bashir followed in the footsteps of the other Arab dictators intending to show the demonstrators partly as outlaws and spies with the official media addressing them as gays. He dismissed the suggestion that the protest was part of the Arab Spring, remarking that the demonstrators were merely a group of agitators whose aims are not shared by the majority of the Sudanese.
The Khartoum government has insisted on continuing with its austerity plans despite the public opposition. Sudan’s finance minister Ali Mahmoud said the government would stick to its decision to cut fuel subsidies regardless of the continued anti-austerity protests in Khartoum and other cities.
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Protesters march in Omdurman, Sudan’s largest city, just across the Nile from capital Khartoum. Their movement has listed 15 demands, the biggest of which is for the regime, in power since Omar al-Bashir’s 1989 coup, to leave power. They’re also asking for basic freedoms, inflation controls, and an end to religious discrimination. Though some of the country’s youth and educated elite have long pushed for such a movement, it was Bashir’s June 18 announcement of new austerity cuts, including to fuel subsidies, that sparked yesterday’s protests.
Desperate to slow a growing social movement, Sudan government continues deportations of journalists and bloggers.
June 27, 2012
Sudan deported an Egyptian journalist and briefly detained another prominent blogger on Tuesday, as the authorities attempted to stifle a protest movement that started last week. The demonstration came after President Omar Hassan al-Bashir announced spending cuts and austerity measures, like reducing fuel subsidies and raising taxes.
Salma El Wardany, a journalist who has been reporting on the protests for Bloomberg News, said in a brief telephone conversation with Agence France-Presse from the airport in Khartoum, the capital, that the authorities had ordered her to leave.
According to a series of updates posted on Twitter by her sister, Lina, Ms. Wardany was first informed that she was being deported when she went to renew her press accreditation on Tuesday. After she was initially denied permission to pack before leaving, she was then allowed to collect her things, but only under guard.
Violent Backlash Against Growing Sudanese Student Movement
June 23, 2012
Sudan’s police force ordered its officers to put an end to the demonstrations “immediately”, state media said, after the protests spread throughout the capital a day earlier expanding beyond the core of student activists initially involved.
Angered by a raft of planned austerity measures meant to tackle the country’s $2.4 billion budget deficit, activists have tried to use discontent over a worsening economic crisis to trigger an “Arab Spring”-style uprising against the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Security forces have used teargas and batons to break up the demonstrations, which have taken place in several neighborhoods but have never garnered more than a few hundred people.
On Saturday, the smell of teargas hung in the air and smoke rose from burning tires amid a heavy security presence in the Al-Daim neighborhood, which was also the site of some of the larger protests a day earlier.
A Reuters correspondent saw around 300 to 400 demonstrators, but it was difficult to estimate the total number of protesters as they were scattered in small groups on different streets.
Protests followed the same pattern in the Sajjana neighborhood, where small groups of demonstrators moved through side streets, blocked roads, burned tires and chanted “freedom, freedom”, and “the people want to overthrow the regime”.
In January, last year, similar protests broke out after students in the nation vowed to replicate the Arab Spring that has swept over the Middle East. The government cracked down on those protests harshly too. But with the experience of last year’s social movement, can the people of Sudan turn this movement into something capable of stopping the oppressive Sudanese government? thepeoplesrecord.com will continue to monitor the situation.
June 17, 2012
Sudanese riot police on Sunday used tear gas and batons to disperse a student protest in Khartoum against the high cost of living and a government that allows the working poor to absorb all of the pressure of a strained economy.
