Sudan remains in limbo since the revolution is a mockery

Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Martin Meredith recalls the time in 1989 when Omar Hassan El Bashir took the oath of office as President of Sudan. Riding on the wave of a military coup by the National Salvation Revolution, Bashir held the Koran in one hand and a Russian Kalashnikov in the other. In the volume titled The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years Independence, Meredith remembers how Bashir said: “I vow to purge from our midst the renegades, the hirelings, enemies of the people and enemies of the armed forces.” The self-styled revolutionary went on: “Anyone who betrays the nation does not deserve the honour of living.”

The Spiderman of Sudan arrived brandishing the two symbols of the power he would ruthlessly exercise for the next 30 years. His drunkenness with power would push him to the fringes of the International Criminal Court at The Hague, where he remains an outlaw – a veritable wanted criminal. This defiant fugitive was deposed this week, in the same way he deposed those who went before him.

It is instructive that like in 1989, when he took over from Premier Sadiq al-Mahdi, the word “revolution” was on everyone’s lips. Yet not for the first time, either. In 1985, strongman Jaafar Numeiri was deposed by what called itself a “Transitional Military Council.” Four years later, the council was still “in transit,” paving way for Bashir and his fellow coup makers to hijack a popular uprising and perch themselves into power. The Bashir led National Salvation (sic) Revolution overthrew the three-year old government of al-Mahdi.

The rest has been a three-decade history of murder and mayhem. It has been the tale of an Arab-Islamist-military dictatorship. UN estimates show that up to 300,000 people have been killed in the war in Darfur since 2004. The state-sponsored Janjaweed militias displaced some 2.7 million. Overall, about 5 million people have been directly and adversely affected by the war in Darfur. The actual state of the Darfur conflict remains in the balance. This is to say nothing of the South. Up to 2 million people died during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Most of it was under Bashir’s direct watch. Where they did not come in the line of military artillery, they succumbed to general conflict conditions.

Regrettably, the coming of independence to the South in 2011 only handed the new country to a new pair of lords of trauma. Ironically, Bashir leaves the centre stage when the principal architects of war in the South – President Salva Kir and his nemesis Riek Machar – are at The Vatican, for bonding before Pope Francis II.

Meanwhile, nothing fundamental has happened in Khartoum, except that Bashir, a man who rose by the sword, has fallen by the sword. The so-called “revolution” is essentially a palace coup. If is a farce. The coup makers are Bashir’s cronies. Sensing danger from unrelenting mass protests, they moved swiftly to insinuate themselves upon the people, in the guise of “staging a revolution.” But revolutions are never “staged.”

Revolutions are factors of unstoppable mass action. They are spontaneous and have lives of their own. No amount of armed force or violence can stop a revolution whose time has come. The people simply become drunk with the urge to die for change. The blood of the martyrs becomes the seed of more ardent revolutionaries. The taste of the Sudanese pudding is going to be in the people’s response to the curfew by the palace coup makers.

Meanwhile Sudan is a lessons galore for Africa. It is instructive that it is not the mass murders, the razing down of whole villages and districts, or the Islamist amputations that rocked Bashir. It was the cost of bread, fuel shortages and allied “little popular grievances.” Political stewards who take the people for granted as billions are looted beware. You have an appointment with personal disaster. The day comes when the rats will refuse to go back to their holes. And when that day comes, the very people you dine with will turn against you. They will arrest you. They will announce that they have staged “a national salvation revolution.”

Sudanese professionals have been at the heart of the protests. When professionals are rattled out of their comfort zones, change will come. But, provided that they look on like outsiders, looters and sundry buccaneers will otherwise have their way. Instructively, also, is the role of women in driving change. Alaa Saleh, a 22-year-old student has been the symbol of protest. She is at once the emblem of female power and the might of the youth. Nothing can stop the combined force of womanpower and youth power. They will burst into barricaded palaces and flush out the inmates like mice.

Sudan remains in limbo, however, for the so-called “revolution” is at this moment a mockery. When asking “the rats to return to their holes,” President Bashir vowed that he could only step down for a fellow soldier. Is he a part of a conspiracy to rob the people of their revolution? Alaa Saleh’s work is not yet done. Meanwhile, Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt are on the list of shame for their cronyism with a mass murderer whom international justice is looking for.

- The writer is a strategic public communications adviser.  www.barrackmuluka.co.ke