9th anniversary of ‘The Massacre’ marked in Port Sudan

On Thursday, thousands of people in Port Sudan in eastern Sudan commemorated the 9th anniversary of “the massacre” in which more than 20 people from the Beja tribe were killed ten years ago.

Relatives of the people killed in the demonstration in Port Sudan, addressed the crowd that gathered at the city’s Martyrs Square.

They condemned the Red Sea state authorities for closing the case without disclosing its contents, and not taking any legal action against the perpetrators, and demanded compensation for the victims.

On 29 January 2005, more than 20 Beja demonstrators were killed, and at least 400 were injured, among them women and children, in Port Sudan's Deim El Arab district. The peaceful protesters called upon the government to allocate more resources to the marginalised region. Hundreds of protesters were detained.

The Beja Congress, a political organisation founded in 1957 to champion the rights of the eastern Sudanese, reported in a press release issued after the mass incident, that the protesters were “shot down by government forces brought in from Khartoum by air.

“The governor of the Red Sea state admitted later that the demonstration of the Beja people was peaceful, and that there was just a misunderstanding,” according to the press statement at the time.

Since then, the Beja Congress has been calling for an investigation into the 2005 massacre during its annual commemoration of the victims.

Elections

During the commemoration ceremony on Thursday, Abdallah Musa, a representative of the Beja Congress, announced the organisation’s boycott of the upcoming April general elections. He also said that the Beja Congress “totally rejects the recent constitutional amendments”.

The constitutional amendments, approved by the Sudanese parliament in December last year, concern, apart from the inclusion of the 2011 Doha Document for Peace in Darfur in the 2005 Interim Constitution, the appointment of state governors by the Sudanese president instead of being elected, and the matching of the status and powers of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) and its Rapid Support Forces militias to those of the armed forces.