By Tirthankar ChandaPosted on 22-01-2019Modified the 22-01-2019 at 22:31
For almost thirty years, the septuagenarian Omar al-Bashir has been leading Sudan with an iron fist, relying on the powerful NISS, the National Intelligence and Security Service. His diet is allied to the great powers, but he has blood on his hands. Since 2009, the strongman of the regime is himself under a warrant of arrest issued by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Darfur. Suffocated by a dysfunctional economy, the Sudanese have been demonstrating in the streets for a month and demanding the departure of their president. This dispute has become, according to analysts, the biggest challenge to the Sudanese head of state since he came to power in 1989 by a coup. Back on the course of one of the most controversial political leaders of the African continent.
While popular discontent rages in the streets of Sudan, the American news site The Daily Beast caused a sensation by returning to an episode little known informal negotiations that took place in early 2010 between Sudanese military and a Washington's high-ranking diplomat, aimed at overthrowing Omar al-Bashir's already decried regime in Khartoum.
The website reports that in 2012, Ambassador Princeton Lyman, who at the time was the Special Envoy of the State Department in charge of Sudan and South Sudan , was discreetly contacted by a group of officers and of non-commissioned officers of the Sudanese army. They complained of being " professionally tired " of Bashir's leadership. Anxious to change the negative image of Sudan, which for too long has been headed by an " autocrat " accused of genocide and suspected of financing terrorism around the world, these soldiers were wondering how the United States would react to the overthrow of the Sudanese regime by coup d'état.
America, the first power in the world, could not officially support a coup that goes against international legality, the diplomat had answered in substance to his interlocutors. While suggesting, between the lines, that if the putschists committed to restore democracy in Khartoum and ensure respect for human rights, Washington would not oppose the change.
The rest of the story is known. The plot was discovered by the Sudanese government, the arrested officers and the regime's No. 1 securocrat, Salah Gosh , who had been mobilized by the plotters to give a political face to their putsch, fell out of favor. This probably explains why he never went to meet Ambassador Lyman in his hotel in Cairo, as was agreed between the Sudanese military and the American diplomat.
An authoritarian and safe regime
Princeton Lyman died in August 2018, not without having confided to the press his disappointment to see the renewal of Sudan postponed by the dead of Sudan. But the timing of the revelation of this " old " case is probably not random. It sounds like a warning to the Sudanese regime, as the country has been plunged for weeks into a near-insurgency crisis and analysts are questioning the scenarios for ending the crisis. With or without the withdrawal of the strong man from the regime?
This is not, however, the first popular uprising that President Bashir has faced since his takeover in 1989 by a coup d'état, overthrowing a democratically elected government. In 2013 already, riots against a rise of more than 60% of the fuels had shaken the regime. This was a direct result of the secession of South Sudan in 2011, in which three-quarters of Sudan's oil wells were located.
The revolt was muted after a police crackdown that left 200 dead and more than a thousand wounded. " The regime took the opportunity to refocus the power around intelligence and security services and army hawks ," said at the time on the RFI researcher on Sudan Jerome Tubiana . This refocusing will allow the government to quickly contain protests that shake the country again in January 2018, in response to the inflation of food prices. If the authorities seem to have more trouble controlling the ongoing dispute today, " it's partly ," says Christian Elmet, a researcher emeritus and specialist in Sudan, because people are desperate. They are convinced that the improvement of their fate now involves the overthrow of this regime, which devotes 80% of its budget to defense and security in the sole concern of ensuring its own sustainability .
" The regime is extremely authoritarian and secure, " added Sudanese historian Willow Berridge, a specialist in Sudan. This is not surprising given the militarism that defines the career and political vision of its founder, Omar al-Bashir. Born in 1944 to a modest peasant family in Hosha Bannaga, a village some 100 kilometers north of Khartoum, the man was fascinated from an early age by his military career. This ambition pushed him, the completed secondary studies, to continue his training in a military school in Cairo and fight in the Egyptian army during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
Returning to Khartoum in the mid-1970s, the young colonel quickly climbed the ranks of the Sudanese army, while taking a critical look at the turbulence of his country's political life. Very involved with other officers and non-commissioned officers of his promotion of paratroopers in the movement that led in 1985 to the fall of President Gafaar Nimeiry released by the army, he will be careful not to make the mistakes of the deposed president when he took power in 1989, at the head of a military junta. His first acts as a strong new man will be to put under his thumb the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS ), the security services and intelligence and to retain the army by giving him whole areas of the economy.
A diplomatic pariah
The success of the coup d'etat of June 30, 1989 is also explained by the support given to the military junta by the Islamists, led at the time by the sulfurous Hassan al-Tourabi. Under the influence of this popular preacher, Omar al-Bashir engages the country on the path of radical Islamism, introducing sharia into a national society divided at the time between the predominantly Muslim north and the south populated by Christians and Christians. 'animists. With this forced Islamization, the civil war raging since 1983 between Khartoum and non-Muslim southern rebels will worsen, eventually leading to secession from the south and economic evils that Sudan is struggling to recover. The conflict cost two million lives and ended only in 2005.
The Sudan of the 1990s when Omar al-Bashir installed his power is a real Islamo-militaristic cocktail, with the presence on his soil of jihadists who fought in Afghanistan, including al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. He lived in Khartoum between 1991 and 1996, before being expelled under pressure from the United States. Along the way, the regime will distance itself from the Islamist Turabi, singled out as the main cause of the deterioration of Sudan's image in the world. It is indeed from this time, more precisely from 1993, that dates the placement of Sudan, suspected of harboring terrorists involved in attacks on the territory of the United States, on the US black list of " States supporting terrorism ".
The armed conflicts that have marked the reign of Omar al-Bashir, including those against the rebels in the South, but also in Darfur with hundreds of millions of deaths and millions of displaced people, as well as in many other parts of the country, have also contributed to Sudan's diplomatic isolation. The killings and the crimes committed in Darfur by the troops launched by the Khartoum strong man are worth to Khartoum being accused of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The arrest warrant issued by the Hague Court in 2009 makes Omar al-Bashir the first incumbent head of state to be indicted by this court, limiting his freedom to travel abroad for fear of being stopped.
But the man is tough and does not hesitate to challenge the ICC, as evidenced by 150 visits to foreign countries he has made since the launch of the arrest warrant against him on March 4, 2009. 19 days after this fateful date, President Bashir was in Eritrea on an official trip. He has since been received in Beijing by Xi Jinping , in Moscow, two years ago by Vladimir Putin , but also in Cairo, Pretoria, Ndjamena and more recently by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus .
The backyard of Egypt
It is undoubtedly this spirit of distrust that pushed the president-general to come out recently in the streets of Khartoum in full boiling to taunt the protesters he described as " plotters ". Waving his cane over his head, he harangued the crowd of militants from his party who were taken by bus from distant provinces that he still owned, not to mention " foreign agents, traitors and mercenaries ". A phraseology that refers to foreign interests, including those of the United States responsible, in Khartoum's eyes, for its economic difficulties. Did the embargo imposed by Washington for 20 years not prevent it from conducting business and financial transactions internationally?
Sudan police confront protesters as Bashir rejects charges: France 24 https://t.co/2H0SpPSJM9
EcoInternet (@EcoInternetDrGB) January 22, 2019For many observers of the Sudanese political life, this public distrust aimed at Westerners is the Grand Guignol, intended to impress the gallery. In fact, since the attacks of at least September 11, 2001, the Sudanese regime has been working hand in hand with the West, particularly with the Americans. The CIA, which has set up its largest office in Africa in Khartoum, relies on influential security and intelligence services, the NISS, to infiltrate Somali shebabs and fight jihadist cells that thrive in neighboring Libya. dysfunctional. It was under the pressure of the CIA and Pentagon leaders that Barack Obama made the decision to loosen US sanctions against the Sudanese regime.
The Trump administration, for its part, pursued the same policy by deepening it, by lifting in October 2017 the decades-old trade embargo and by initiating negotiations to get Sudan out of the list of " States supporting terrorism". ". A decision in this direction would be imminent. "No matter what Bashir's mistakes, the Americans will not let him down because they do not want the brothel to come to Sudan, which is after all the backyard of Egypt, " Christian Elmet adds.
For Europeans too, Khartoum is a strategic pillar in their fight against migration. " Any instability in this country could lead to a new wave of migration to Europe, " said a diplomat on condition of anonymity. This strategic position that Sudan occupies today in the Horn of Africa is a boon to Omar al-Bashir. Aware of his strength, he even diversified his diplomacy, inviting Russia to come and set up a military base on the Red Sea. End strategist, the man has also reconnected with the Saudis and Emirati, while making the eyes soft to their rivals Turkish and Qatar.
The three scenarios
However, it is not at all sure that this clever mix of geopolitical alliances could be enough for Omar al-Bashir to get his country out of the economic slump it has been going through since the loss of most of its oil resources, nor for to contain the waves of protest that his military-security regime has been facing for more than a month. The coffers are empty and investors do not want to come to a country governed by a regime deemed corrupt and predatory.
Economically asphyxiated because of inflation that reached 70% at the end of 2018 and the repeated devaluations of their currency, the Sudanese protesters demand bread, but also development and democracy. They demand the departure of Omar al-Bashir, who had been appointed just before the presidential elections in 2020 for a third term, while the Constitution allows two. This perspective is perhaps compromised by the contestation of which the end is not seen and which seems to win even the camps of power. Social networks talk about scenes of fraternization between protesters and security forces.
" We have entered a revolutionary pattern ," says Christian Elmet, a researcher emeritus and specialist in Sudan, recalling that the first two regimes that this country experienced after independence were overthrown in 1964 and 1985 by popular uprisings. similar to the current protest movement. Even the opposition, long abused by the regime, seems to believe it. Twenty-two opposition parties have signed a joint communiqué calling for the establishment of a " transitional government (...) that would call elections to restore democracy and public freedoms " in the country.
" The process at work in the country is likely to bring about the brutal end of the regime in place, although I do not believe that we have yet reached a point of no return in Sudan where the regular army and the security apparatus can turn against President Bashir, "Judge Ahmed Soliman of the Chatham House think-tank, based in London.
The power of Omar al-Bashir, could it survive the current crisis, also questions the think tank International Crisis Group (ICG), in a report published in early January. This report proposes three scenarios for the end of the crisis: military coup, resignation of Omar al-Bashir or survival of the regime and its founder. This last scenario seems the most plausible in the current state of power relations, according to researchers and analysts. But " it will be at the cost of continuing economic decline, more popular anger, more demonstrations and harsher repression ," writes the ICG rapporteur.
On the same subject
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