A protester was killed in Sudan on Tuesday, October 25, as thousands of people marched through the streets of Khartoum to say "no to military power", a year to the day after the putsch that plunged the country into chaos.
The Western chancelleries had called on the military power not to fire on the crowd, in a context of increased security repression which left 119 dead in one year.
On Tuesday, faced with a mobilization on an unprecedented scale for months, no shots were heard but a demonstrator "was killed, overthrown by a military vehicle" in the suburbs of Khartoum, said pro-democracy doctors.
All day, despite an internet cut - finally restored at the end of the day - the demonstrators chanted "the soldiers in the barracks", in Khartoum and its suburbs, where in the evening many roads were still blocked.
Because from dawn, the two camps had been activated: the demonstrators erected barricades to slow down the advance of the security forces and these blocked bridges and avenues to prevent a surge of protesters towards the presidential palace where the seat General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, the author of the coup of October 25, 2021.
It is near this building that the police, who accuse some demonstrators of being "armed and trained in violence", fired tear gas canisters in an attempt to disperse the crowd.
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Blocked situation
Since the putsch, demonstrators and activists have repeated the same slogan: "no negotiation or partnership with the putschists" and the return to power of civilians, a sine qua non condition for the resumption of international aid interrupted following the putsch.
"We've been protesting for a year and that allowed us to contain the putsch: it couldn't win international or regional recognition," a protester in Khartoum told AFP.
"This is the first time in history that we have seen a putsch fail to advance an inch in an entire year", welcomes another demonstrator, a little further on, white jellaba and Sudanese flag on the shoulder.
A year ago, General Burhane, head of the army, broke all the commitments made two years earlier in Sudan.
At dawn, he had the civilian leaders with whom he had agreed to share power arrested when, in 2019, the army was forced by the streets to depose one of its own, the dictator Omar al-Bashir after three decades in power.
A year later, again, thousands of Sudanese shouted at him in Atbara, in the north of the country, as well as in Wad Madani and al-Obeid, in the center, in Gedaref and Port-Sudan, in the east, and in Niyala, in the west, residents told AFP.
Sudan is swimming in uncertainty.
No observer imagines possible the holding of the elections promised in the summer of 2023, no political figure seeming so far ready to join the civilian government regularly promised by General Burhane, while international mediations have not succeeded.
Between three-digit inflation and food shortages, a third of the 45 million inhabitants suffer from hunger.
This is 50% more than a year ago, underlines the World Food Program (WFP).
International aid is sorely needed in this country, one of the poorest in the world.
With AFP
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