♦ This week’s news in brief ♦

A compact weekly digest of Dabanga Sudan's highlights of the news from Darfur and Sudan

♦ Sudan fuel crisis 'has reached its limit': transport, water pumps halted

May 8 – 2018 KHARTOUM The fuel crisis that has been plaguing Sudan since March has led to an almost entire stop of traffic and public transport, especially in the periphery of the country. The transportation in many places in Darfur has stopped entirely because of the depletion of fuel.

“The Sudanese call the ongoing fuel scarcity ‘katma’ [suppression, stifling], which means that the crisis has reached its limit,” an angry listener from Khartoum told Radio Dabanga. A number of car owners performed their Friday prayers at the petrol station where they queued for fuel. This prompted people to take pictures and videos of them and posted them on social media to contradict Sudanese officials who claimed the crisis has been solved.

Yesterday a Sudanese minister said that Saudi Arabia considers to jump in and supply Sudan’s needs for oil under a new agreement. The country would then provide Sudan with about 1.8 million tonnes of oil a year, for the next five years.

But at the moment, farmers in Sudan, especially in the eastern and central parts of the country, have warmed for harvest failures because of the scarcity of fuel. Concerned cattle traders have also warned about the death of a livestock, including those in transport. “Thousands of livestock on which people rely for their livelihood are at risk of dying because there is little diesel available to use for pumping up drinking water,” said Siddig Yousef, leading member of the opposition’s Communist Party, yesterday.

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♦ NISS confiscates newspapers covering Sudan crises

May 8 – 2018 KHARTOUM On Monday morning, the Sudanese security apparatus (NISS) confiscated all 8,500 copies of El Jareeda newspaper from the printing press. It is the second newspaper to be confiscated within 24 hours.

El Jareeda editor-in-chief Ashraf Abdelaziz told Radio Dabanga yesterday that members of the security service arrived at 2am on Monday and seized all 8,500 printed copies of the newspaper. He suspects that their coverage of the issue of the displacement of about 1,500 people because of fighting in the Jebel Marra in Central Darfur sparked the NISS into this action.

The confiscation came a day after the NISS had confiscated the newspaper Akhbar El Watan, which is owned by the Sudanese Congress Party (SCP), from the printing press on Sunday morning. Abdelaziz: “We have received instructions from the security apparatus not to deal with any issues related to the crises.” The warning also included no coverage of the economic crisis, the fuel crisis, and the rise in food and consumer good prices.

“But this is difficult in the reality of an editorial room: the newspaper cannot disregard such crises without expressing the concerns and issues of Sudanese people.”

The confiscation of the copies has caused El Jareeda financial losses which its office estimates to be more than SDG40,000 ($1,421). On May 4, the International Day of Press Freedom, Sudanese journalists stressed that the confiscation of newspapers remains a tool of the security service to drain out newspapers’ budgets.

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