Opinion: ‘El Burhan Eid speech leaves zero options for Sudan’

The speech of the president of the Sovereignty Council and commander-in-chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), Lt Gen Abdelfattah El Burhan, on the occasion of Eid El Fitr, represents a new turning point in the political arena, and an attempt to cancel the dates and events that changed the political scene in Sudan represented in the 2018 December Revolution that overthrew the Al Bashir regime. El Burhan stressed in his speech that there is no return to the pre-war, revolution, and the October 25 coup. Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Commander Mohamed Hamdan Hemedti expressed in his Eid speech the intention to curtail “unruly behaviour” and “to deal with them decisively”.

In an interview with Radio Dabanga yesterday, writer and political analyst Mohamed Hereika told reporter Mohamed Suleiman that El Burhan’s speech was very short and intense and “can be viewed from more than one angle”. Hereika emphasised that “the Eid speech for the nation carried ‘the three nos’: There is no return to before April 15, no return to before October 25, and no return to April 2019… very simply as if he is now proclaiming the beginning of creation, the history of Sudan does not exist, and that only proof exists that determines the future, past and present of Sudan.”

‘Things are a puppet theatre…’

Hereika lamented that “El Burhan did not address the issue of the continuation of the war and the unfortunate and painful reality experienced by the Sudanese people, but rather addressed his very subjective dreams linked to the battle of dignity, and this means a real torpedo of all the uprising and revolution that took place in December, and in which he waved to his partners and in which there is a kind of tactic. Things are a puppet theatre.”

History starts here

Hereika continued by saying that “In my estimation the army commander-in-chief wants to say that history starts from here and ends from here in the personality of El Burhan. This means closing the way for any political dialogue because he says that he will not talk to a person, entity, or anyone until after the end of the battle, in which El Burhan assumes that he is the victorious party who will write history according to the adage that ‘the victors are the ones who write history’.”

‘Resolving the unruly’

Hereika believes that the mainstream RSF is a complex that extends on a global scale and global public opinion in addition to local public opinion, which has been linked to violence, murder, rape, and other things.

He noted that the RSF commander clearly indicated in his Eid El Fitr speech that the unruly elements within the RSF were mentioned before, and that he formed a committee led by Gen Fadil that has judicial and other powers to try these violators. “But despite that, abuses have remained.”