The Sudanese Revolution and the Fall of Bashir
Sudanese protesters brought down Omar al-Bashir in April 2019 after thirty years, and the generals took the country back within two. The protests began in December 2018 in Atbara, a railway town with a long trade union tradition, over the tripling of the price of bread. The economy behind that was broken. South Sudan's secession in 2011 had taken about three-quarters of the oil, the country was under American sanctions, and inflation was in three figures. The movement was organised by the Sudanese Professionals Association — doctors, lawyers, teachers — and was notable for how many of the people in the streets were women, who by some counts were the majority. A sit-in outside the army headquarters in Khartoum began on 6 April, and the army removed Bashir five days later rather than fire on it. He had taken power in a coup in 1989, imposed Islamic law, hosted bin Laden, fought a civil war that killed some two million people, lost the south, and been indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Darfur. The sit-in continued because the demand was civilian government. On 3 June the Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary grown out of the Janjaweed militias of Darfur — cleared it, killing over a hundred people and throwing bodies into the Nile. A power-sharing agreement followed, was overthrown by a coup in October 2021, and the two armed forces that had staged it went to war with each other in April 2023. The chant the protesters used, that they were all Darfur, was an attempt to attach the capital's grievance to a war the capital had ignored for fifteen years. The force that cleared the sit-in was the one that had fought that war.
- Year: 2019 CE
- Category: Political
