Did deal ending Sudan coup leave Sudanese out of the picture?

It was Ahmed’s sixth protest in six weeks.

Despite the risks from the military’s deadly crackdown on demonstrations, the unemployed Sudanese university graduate says he had nothing to lose.

“There is no going back,” the 20-something says from Khartoum, Sudan, while participating in nationwide protests Monday.

“No to negotiations, no to collaboration with the military, yes to revolution,” he adds. “Either we achieve a full, civilian democracy right now, or we die an oppressed people.”

The international community is hailing the Nov. 21 deal that ended a nearly monthlong military coup that threatened the country’s steps toward democracy. But Sudanese protesters like Ahmed who demanded the release of civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok now blame him for making too many concessions.

It is part of a boiling over of frustration on the Sudanese streets that the international community, in its pursuit of compromise and diplomacy, has shut average Sudanese out of Sudan’s transition away from dictatorship, which they say is moving too slowly.

Since the overthrow of dictator Omar al-Bashir, the international community has worked with decades-old political parties, technocrats, and the military. However, critics say the West has overlooked the grassroots activists and average Sudanese who powered the revolution.

These consist of loosely organized self-declared resistance committees, student unions, women’s groups, and networks of young activists organizing at the neighborhood level, whom observers say Sudanese politicians, the military, and the international community have struggled to communicate with and comprehend.

“At the root of all this is the fact that not the international community, nor the military, nor the political elites in Khartoum reach out to these youth groups, women’s groups, and resistance committees that have been the drivers of political change,” says Kholood Khair, manager of Insight Strategy Partners, a think-and-do-tank in Khartoum that provides transition policy advice.

“They just don’t speak to them; there is a massive disconnect. The whole transition is predicated on a superficial analysis that doesn’t take into account where the real politics happen – on the ground.”

Distrust of military

Amid alarm bells that authoritarian forces are slowly hijacking Sudan’s democracy before it even begins, grassroots pressure is building for an immediate end to military rule.

The armed forces, many Sudanese insist, cannot be trusted.  

As part of a 2019 deal brokered by the United Nations and United States following Mr. Bashir’s ouster, civilian and military officials ruled Sudan jointly in an uneasy partnership.

Prime Minister Hamdok and Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander in chief of Sudan’s armed forces, governed under a civilian-military Sovereign Council to steer the country’s transition to democracy. That is, until an Oct. 25 coup by General Burhan, when the military placed Mr. Hamdok and his Cabinet under arrest.

After a month of nationwide protests, on Nov. 21, Mr. Hamdok signed an agreement with the military ending the coup and restoring the civilian Cabinet.

But in what many Sudanese describe as a “reward” for the coup, the deal also stripped away most of the civilians’ powers and increased the military’s authority.

Sudanese, including the Sudanese Professional Associations, unionists who helped mobilize the 2019 revolution, immediately protested what they described as a “betrayal” and a “legitimizing of the coup.”

Swift change in mood

As the deal was announced, protesters who moments earlier were singing songs in the streets demanding Mr. Hamdok’s freedom, immediately crossed out his photos and chanted against him.

“The Sudanese people refuse this political agreement because it solidifies the military’s powers it seized in the Oct. 25 coup and will not lead to a civilian democracy,” says Mohammed al-Noor, a resistance committee organizer.

“This is not a transition to democracy. From a legal and rights perspective, the situation today is much worse for the Sudanese people.”

The new agreement delays until 2023 General Burhan’s handing over the chair of the Sovereign Council to a civilian from the original date of Nov. 17, 2021.

Unlike the original post-revolution agreement, the new pact calls for elections but does not give a specified date for a handover to a full civilian government, a concession that critics say opens the door for the military to rule indefinitely.

“The nationwide protests after the coup were never for Hamdok as a person – they were hoping Hamdok would maintain his position refusing to negotiate with the military until protests succeeded in pressing Burhan and the military officers to resign,” says Jihad Mashamoun, a Sudanese political analyst.

“People’s protests were focused on encouraging a counter-coup against Burhan and the officers to establish a full civilian government, not for a return to the status quo. This is less than even that.”

Yet the international community has held up the agreement and the return of Mr. Hamdok from house arrest to the prime minister’s office as a success, urging Sudanese to accept the agreement.

“I think the calling into question this particular solution, even if I do understand why people are outraged, would be very dangerous for Sudan,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres cautioned in a joint U.N.-African Union press conference Dec. 1, calling on “the people of Sudan to support Prime Minister Hamdok over the next stages so we can have a peaceful transition towards a true democracy.”

Mr. Guterres and many Western diplomats fear that confrontation between the military, its allied militias, and civilians could ignite widespread violence that would unravel a year-old peace among warring groups and plunge the country into civil war. With neighboring Ethiopia embroiled in war, they worry further armed conflict could ignite the entire horn.

In response, dozens of Sudanese protested in front of the office of the U.N. Mission to Sudan in Khartoum last week, holding signs in English and Arabic reading “the Nov. 21 agreement is not a democratic transition” and “the military coup doesn’t represent our goals!”

Return of the regime?

Driving Sudanese rejection of the military’s role in their transition is what they describe as a creeping return of the Bashir regime, itself a military-Islamist dictatorship, through legitimate and illegitimate means.

General Burhan was appointed by Mr. Bashir as military commander in 2018, and several senior officers involved in the transition have ties to the deposed regime.

In the post-coup agreement with Mr. Hamdok, General Burhan appointed two figures from the former regime to the 11-member Sovereign Council.

While civilians serve as ministers, the military has spent months stacking the government bureaucracy, filling undersecretaries and senior positions with former regime figures in the ministries of justice, foreign affairs, education, regional governments, and state banks, sparking multiple protests this summer.

Activists say militias have killed hundreds of protesters with impunity since the 2019 revolution and 40 since the Oct. 25 coup.

They highlight the arrest of members of the Empowerment Removal Committee, a task force established to track down stolen assets and remove Bashir loyalists from state institutions.

Then there is the military conducting its own foreign policy, meeting frequently with officials from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel, sparking concerns it is forming regional alliances to cement its power.

“In Sudan, for 52 of the last 60 years we have lived under military dictatorships,” says Dalia Eltahir, a journalist and presenter for Omdurman TV network. “We know what it looks like, and we refuse to return back after we have paid such a heavy price.

“We Sudanese are convinced that foreigners always see working with the military as better than democracies, and that Africans can only be ruled by dictatorships,” she says. “Their recent actions support this, but we push on in spite of them.”

Adds Mr. Noor, the resistance organizer: “In reality, the continuation of military and militia rule will hurt stability, it will make people give up hope, lose their sense of security, migrate for alternatives.

“All we ask the international community is not to look only at short-term violence, but consider the long-term stability of a country where the democratic rights of the people are upheld.”