Ruling military council says it will hold elections within nine months as crackdown on protesters draws condemnation.
Sudan’s Transitional Military Council (TMC) has decided to cancel all agreements with the main opposition coalition and will move ahead with elections to be held within nine months, its head has said.
The announcement by Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in the early hours of Tuesday came after security forces fired live ammunition to clear the main protest site outside the military headquarters in Khartoum, the focal point in the demonstrators’ months-long struggle for
civilian rule.
Protest groups said at least 35 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the raid by the security forces, calling it a “bloody massacre”.
“The military council decided to stop negotiating with the Alliance for Freedom and Change [group representing protesters in negotiations] and cancel what had been agreed on and to hold general elections within nine months,” al-Burhan said in a televised statement.
Al-Burhan said the TMC would now move to set up an interim government to prepare for elections, which he added would be internationally supervised.
But protesters insisted that al-Bashir’s removal from power was not enough. Tens of thousands remained in place in Khartoum and other camps around the country, pushing the generals who replaced al-Bashir to swiftly hand over power to a civilian-led administration.
The bloody assault and dispersal of the Khartoum sit-in now risk escalating violence even further, making a more intense face-off between the military and protesters more likely.
Pro-democracy protesters vowed to keep up their campaign, suspending talks and calling for “total civil disobedience” to “paralyse public life” across the country.
“This is a critical point in our revolution. The military council has chosen escalation and confrontation,” said Mohamed Yousef al-Mustafa, a spokesman for the Sudanese Professionals’ Association (SPA), which has spearheaded the months-long protests.
“Those are criminals who should have been treated like al-Bashir,” he said. “Now the situation is either them or us, there is no other way.”
