How can the revolution win in Sudan?
With extraordinary courage, ordinary people have been defying a military coup in Sudan.
They have demonstrated in huge numbers, night after night. Workers in oil fields, airports, schools, hospitals and universities have struck and called for civil disobedience.
People have resisted despite arrests, beatings, shootings and many killings by security forces.
The military, which has a long history of mass murder and torture, thought it could intimidate the population of 45 million into fearful acceptance of its rule. It has instead met an enraged fightback which has the potential to accelerate change.
What began as an attempt to bury the idea of radical change could become a spur to a far more revolutionary outcome. But that depends on how the most determined and far-sighted people in the pro-democracy movement now organise.
The central battle at the moment is against the military. The strongest unity in action is needed to defeat it.
But there is also a sharp battle inside the pro-democracy forces. In 2019, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) that headed the movement gained strength from the great waves of struggle and strikes against the military.
But its leaders channelled this power into securing a compromise deal.
Instead of overthrowing the killer generals, they installed them as the leading elements in a transitional government.
And they have worked with these generals ever since, despite widespread anger at the slow pace of change.
The non-military members of Sudan’s transitional council undoubtedly oppose the coup. Some of them are under arrest and fear for their lives.
But they also want to fit in with the global powers, particularly the US, that are central to the capitalist system. Over the last year, the civilian prime minister Abdalla Hamdok had tried to extract debt relief from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This was achieved—at a high political and economic price.
Sudan had to persuade the US to remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. This required opening full diplomatic relations with Israel. The military pushed this hardest, but the civilian cabinet members went along with it.
In April, the Sudanese cabinet as a whole did away with a law that has existed since the 1950s which imposes a boycott of Israel. And last month Sudanese authorities seized assets of companies linked to the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.
Justice minister Nasredeen Abdulbari, one of those detained by the military during the coup, met two Israeli government ministers three weeks ago.
Prime minister Hamdok also implemented the usual pattern of IMF economic structural adjustment—removing subsidies and moving to a floating currency exchange rate.
Such moves have fueled the inflation rate which is now 400 percent a year.
It is empty to talk of “democracy” if people face poverty that is little different to the days of the dictator Omar al-Bahsir.
Now, the Sudanese Professionals Association, a leading element in the FFC, says, “There is no room for any political settlement to save the partnership or keep the military council in power.”
Good. But there is always a danger that the military can be formally sidelined while pulling the strings in reality. This is probably what the generals now want.
The only place for them should be behind bars, and facing full investigation for their murderous deeds in the Darfur area and in 2019. The military should also be stripped of its control of businesses that dominate large parts of the economy.
Those who want real change in Sudan have to fight the liberal opposition elements politically and by raising urgent working class demands over wages, union rights, women’s rights, food supplies and many other questions.
That means that the struggle for democracy has to be linked to the battle to advance the interests of workers and the poor.
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