CAIRO (Reuters) – The United States and the European Union expressed their deep concern on Friday the day after General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s new strongman, appointed a Sovereignty Council with little openness to civilians, a measure they believe could hinder the democratic transition.
Ignoring national and international calls to end the October 25 military coup, the Sudanese army chief on Thursday formed a new Transitional Council, which he chairs, with the commander of the powerful at his side. paramilitary group of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
General al-Burhan says he is taking these steps to avoid civil war. He pledged after the putsch to ensure a democratic transition, with the organization of elections in July 2023.
The new 14-member executive council no longer has representatives of the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), a political coalition that shared power with the army since 2019 as part of a democratic transition, and which demanded the return from power to civilians.
Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has been under house arrest since the putsch, and several ministers have been arrested.
This “complicates efforts to put Sudan back on the path of democratic transition,” underlined in a joint declaration the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland.
Denouncing a “violation” of the original agreements, they “strongly warn against further escalation”.
The German Volker Perthes, United Nations special representative for Sudan, said Friday that the initiative of the Sudanese army chief “made the return to constitutional order very difficult”.
Local “resistance committees” and the Association of Sudanese Professionals (SDA), behind the uprising that led to the fall of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019, have called for civil disobedience and demonstrations.
Activists who demand a return to civil power are calling for large gatherings on Saturday under the slogan: “No negotiation, no partnership, no compromise”.
Three people were killed by security forces in a previous demonstration on October 31. A total of 15 opponents have been killed since the military coup.
(Report Nafisa Eltahir and Lilian Wagdy in Cairo, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; written by Tom Perry, French version Sophie Louet, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
–
