This is the second installment of a two-part series of interviews with people organizing in Sudan conducted in May 2024. Read the introduction and the first interview 

If you would like to help grassroots civil society and mutual aid groups at the frontlines of relief efforts in the parts of Sudan most impacted by state violence, donate to the 

— Rabab Elnaiem, Nisrin Elamin, and Sara Abbas

Tahani Ajak, a writer, engineer, teacher, and volunteer who grew up in Sudan and South Sudan, lives in a refugee camp for South Sudanese in White Nile State, close to Sudan’s border with South Sudan. She runs women and youth discussion groups in the camp, helps mothers secure food and other necessities, and writes about life in the camps, shedding light on the grave abuses suffered by refugees at the hands of the Sudanese state and their neglect by humanitarian organizations.

Until 2011, when South Sudan declared independence from Sudan after decades of struggle, the South Sudanese were citizens of Sudan, albeit ones who faced deep-seated structural racism and a plethora of other intersecting oppressions, including being excluded from positions of power, deprived of educational opportunities, and subject to the forcible extraction of resources from their ancestral lands. Millions, many of whom were born and raised in the north, moved to South Sudan in search of justice, equality, and a better life in a country of their own.

But in 2013, war started again in the newly independent nation, forcing millions to flee and cross the border into neighboring countries, including Sudan. Now holding the status of “refugee” instead of “citizen” and with little material means, many had nowhere to go but the camps. Others moved to Khartoum and other cities and towns across the country in search of work or education or to be near relatives. When the current war started in Sudan in April 2023, it devastated those in the city already living on its margins, as Ajak has 

. Here she talks about the revolution, the war, and life in the camps.

ue to the unstable conditions of war that prevailed for many years in Sudan, my father moved often to find work. My family and I lived in different villages and cities in greater Sudan — its north, south, east, and west. I grew up in the midst of a diverse Sudanese life that saturated me with its beautiful richness, in cultures that shaped my conscience and expanded my knowledge about the nature of life in the country. I grew up embraced by the warmth of the Nile, which divides Sudan from Halfa, in the far north, to Nimule, in the far south, surrounded by stories my grandmother told about the ancestors, which she recounted to us under the magic of the moon hanging over the city of Malakal. That magical moon and the shores of Buri Abu Hashish, the dignity of Jebel Kujur, the sweetness of a cup of coffee under the Taka Mountains, and dancing to the rhythm of the 

 are among the things that motivated me to write, to stay close to people, and to reflect on how they live.

For me, the December Revolution of 2018 is part of an ongoing national project, a struggle that has existed since the founding of the Sudanese state in 1956. The state’s founding was accompanied by the emergence of many popular national liberation movements against the unjust governments that assumed power in the years that followed. State violence peaked with the National Islamic Front’s coup in 1989, which pushed Sudan into a spiral of darkness and greatly increased the suffering of the people. During the 30 years of that regime, the circle of war expanded to encompass all parts of the country.

When the revolution came in 2018, it embodied hope for me and for all Sudanese. It was preceded by student struggles when I was at university, struggles of resistance to military rule. The fight has always been about standing together in the face of injustice, so that we can build a new Sudan that accommodates everyone and establish a civil state in which the values ​​of freedom, peace, justice, and equality are achieved across the society. The December Revolution took place in order to rebuild the Sudanese state along different lines.

The war that began on April 15, 2023, is a real threat to that project and represents a departure from the path of the revolution and its achievements. It threatens people’s lives, their stability and security. All over the country, it proves destructive to everything that was built by the people’s struggles and by the martyrs who gave their lives and blood as a dowry to achieve a free and democratic Sudan.

I believe there is always a way out of the dilemmas that the country experiences. The conflict must be stopped first and a comprehensive peace achieved, and then we must correct the mistakes accumulated from both the recent and the distant past and adhere to the path of the revolution and the peaceful mechanisms it brought to resolve longstanding crises. The most important of these mechanisms are outlined in the cultural and political documents from the struggle itself, including the 2023 Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power.

For me, freedom is a right, not a gift. There was a roar emitted by the masses of Sudan, a roar that made all the streets and alleys of Sudan’s cities and villages buzz. This roar was a popular demand for the realization of a civil state and a farewell to the darkness of dictatorial rule forever.

I think it’s important to say that those who believe in freedom as a right for every human being do not stop extending that right within their own communities, especially among vulnerable groups, such as refugees who need support and assistance. South Sudanese refugees are the biggest refugee group in Sudan. Refugees in Sudan live in almost catastrophic humanitarian conditions and are exposed to many rights violations, especially the youth, who are now subject to a ban on freedom of movement to and from the camps. In this war, young people are a target for both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and are always accused by one side of belonging to the other. They face arrest, torture, and forced deportation. All of these conditions constitute compelling reasons for their escape from the camps. Given how strict the authorities are in not allowing them to leave, they choose the path of being smuggled out, which is fraught with danger and death. Last March, a fishing boat carrying six young South Sudanese refugees who had escaped from the Al-Radeis 1 camp, in White Nile State, sank. Two drowned, and the other four were rescued. Youths continue to try to flee the camp, regardless of the results, because life feels unbearable. Some individuals who care about refugees are fighting with whatever means they have to stand with the youth and extend a helping hand to them. Others write about the youth’s plight, in the hope of receiving help.

We who are doing this kind of work labor under difficult conditions. Sudanese authorities have banned many activities, subject us to questioning or arrest, and sometimes deport us from the camps. We face threats, confiscation of food ration cards, and exposure to violence. Yet what we go through still feels insignificant, because those we are trying to help risk losing their lives, so we continue to support the refugees and stand with them, whatever the consequences.

Children are really vulnerable in refugee camps. Their lives are at risk due to the presence of many diseases, the absence of health care, and the deterioration of their families’ economic conditions. But there are always those who respond to our calls and rush to provide support when the children of the camps are in need, when death snatches them from their mothers’ arms. This happened in the summer of 2023, when a measles epidemic struck the White Nile camps and more than 1,000 children died. We launched a call for support and received help in reaching UNICEF, which then called for a vaccination campaign to prevent more measles deaths among children in the camps. The campaign was implemented by local organizations and the Sudanese Federal Ministry of Health, which trained refugee volunteers from each of the nine White Nile refugee camps. This is how the children in the camps were eventually vaccinated. But the inhumane conditions are a constant threat to children, and things are getting worse.

“Freedom” graffiti on a wall in Khartoum after the removal of President Omar al-Bashir, April 29, 2019. Photograph by Omer Erdem/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Abdulrahman Ali, also known as Abu Lamees, is a blue-collar worker, husband, and father of five daughters. The postcolonial Sudanese state is the country’s largest employer, yet decades of austerity measures and privatization have eroded the public sector, with hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs in the early years of the al-Bashir regime. An expansion of the banking and service sectors followed. This shift in the Sudanese economic structure led to changes in education; skilled/craft education declined, producing a larger informal worker sector. Abu Lamees’s organizing in that informal sector represents a turning point in grassroots organizing with the formation of committees in the Bahri (Khartoum North) industrial zone consisting of multiple blue-collar workers’ organizations.

y connection to the Bahri industrial zone started in 1989, when I entered middle school. My father was fired from his government job and imprisoned by the Islamic Front regime. This forced me to become a mechanic’s helper at the age of 12 to help support my younger siblings.

Living most of my life under a totalitarian regime, I participated in the 2013 uprising. I was detained for about two months, and the experience sparked my interest in organizing. Whispers about the importance of neighborhood resistance committees resonated with me. I began participating in mutual aid and labor organizing activities within my neighborhood and the Bahri industrial zone. My involvement led local government officials to retaliate against me, using commercial licensing and fee regulations as a way to punish me in court and deter me from organizing.

The 2018 revolution further solidified my commitment, when the youths chanted, “The revolution is a union and a neighborhood committee!” I became involved with the resistance committees of Shambat Al-Aradi, fighting against members of the Salvation regime. My activism then expanded to the Bahri local council and the Bahri industrial zone committees.

The Bahri industrial zone committees are built around advocating for the workers and businesses burdened by 

. By siding with the workers against the administrative unit, the committees gained the trust of the community. They act as the voice of the people, fighting for their rights through frequent open meetings to identify and address local issues.The committees operate independently of the government, interacting with authorities only to claim rights. Even under the transitional government, they had to fight hard to secure basic rights for workers, like access to the health center in the Bahri industrial zone, which had been converted to administrative offices by the former regime. The committees’ struggle paid off, and the center was rightfully restored. The workers’ dream of upgrading it to a model hospital remains unfulfilled, however.

The resistance committees are part of the larger Bahri neighborhood committees. The Bahri industrial zone committees are composed of various advocacy and grassroots organizing groups: Bahri industrial zone resistance committees, Bahri Industrial Zone Craftsmen’s Union, Bahri Industrial Zone Small Industries and Crafts Branch, and Bahri Industrial Zone Craftsmen’s Cooperative. The Bahri industrial zone committees also collaborate with numerous unions and organizations in other industrial zones across Khartoum and other states. They have held meetings and workshops to establish a coordination body for all industrial zones, involving representatives from seven zones within Khartoum State.

Work in the Bahri industrial zone falls within the informal sector. In this sector, the workers often double as the employer, running small-scale businesses that are largely overlooked by the government. The state’s attention turns to these workers only when it seeks to extract exorbitant taxes from their meager earnings, offering no services or rights in cases of illness, disability, or old age in return. Moreover, the government does nothing to ensure safe workplaces. Many workers resort to begging or rely on the generosity of their colleagues in their old age. They receive no social security or any other entitlements from the state, despite the hefty taxes and levies imposed upon them, often collected by force.

Prior to the 2018 revolution, workers in the Bahri industrial zone were largely kept in the dark about their rights, a deliberate act to maintain control. They were exploited by pro-regime labor organizations and unions, who used them as pawns for political rallies and conferences, enticing them with false promises like land ownership in exchange for exorbitant membership fees. Crumbling infrastructure, a lack of environmental regulation, and the devastating impact of frequent flooding on the industrial zone were ignored. Those who dared to challenge the regime’s seizure of the workers’ health center faced harassment and even more taxation. The persecution of the founding generation of anti–Salvation regime activists and the targeting of their livelihoods often forced them out of the labor market. The revolution and the relative freedom in the ensuing transitional phase brought about a change. Through ongoing discussions and workshops organized by the Bahri industrial zone committees, workers became increasingly aware of their rights, setting in motion the process of forming more robust labor unions that would represent their aspirations and defend their rights.

The continued activism of the workers, even in the face of renewed oppression following the Oct. 25, 2021, coup, is a testament to the growing consciousness among the Bahri industrial zone’s workforce.

Throughout history, even the longest wars eventually come to an end. The devastating effects of war will only serve to ignite the determination of the Sudanese people, both men and women, to rebuild their nation on the foundations of freedom, peace, and justice. In this process of reconstruction and development, skilled labor armed with knowledge and understanding of its rights and responsibilities will always be the spearhead. Postwar Sudan will be a far cry from its prewar state. The workers will play a pivotal role in shaping a nation worthy of the Sudanese people, rising from the ashes of conflict.

The Resistance Committees Between Revolution and War

Ra-ad Sahaba, born and raised in Mayerno, Sennar State, is a 33-year-old father and a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power. Ra-ad holds a degree in English literature and works as a blacksmith. He spoke about the history of the resistance committees, their methods of working in local communities and connecting with other committees and political entities, and their vision for ending the war.

y political resistance work officially began at the start of my high school education and grew significantly after I entered university. It was not difficult to find the motivation to engage in political resistance against the existing regime. My generation was born and raised during the oppressive rule of the bloody Salvation regime, witnessing atrocities from the very first moment of our lives. People died due to the extremely high cost of health care, which had become part of the private sector, exclusive to a certain class of people and completely inaccessible to the ordinary citizen. We saw a crumbling health care system that lacked the most basic components and an extremely weak education system, with a curriculum designed to serve only the regime’s policies while charging very high tuition fees for students in both public and private institutions.

We witnessed the struggle to obtain essential services such as drinking water and electricity despite the many taxes imposed, including zakat [an obligatory annual charitable donation by every Muslim with means] and other levies, while the regime’s cronies enjoyed privileges and exemptions from almost everything, to the detriment of the economy overall. The suffocating security forces were directed against anyone who opposed the regime and its pervasive corruption. Many citizens lost their jobs, were displaced, or were killed simply for demanding their basic rights and the necessities of life. Add to that assassinations of Sudanese individuals who were not in agreement with the regime, among other targeted crimes. All these atrocities pushed me to take a side. It was never difficult to find reasons to engage in resistance against the regime.

Protesters head to the army headquarters in Khartoum, April 27, 2019. Photograph by Ozan Kose/AFP, via Getty Images.

In terms of the resistance committees, the name might be somewhat recent, but it was not new to the Sudanese people to form such bodies to confront and challenge corrupt regimes. The Sudanese people have long created formations to organize and coordinate, including the Anti-Colonial Front, the National Liberation Movements, the Anti-May Regime Front, which brought down the military regime in 1985, and other revolutionary organizations throughout the history of the Sudanese state. The resistance committees in their current form started during the 2013 uprising and evolved, reaching their peak during the glorious December Revolution.

A resistance committee is a horizontally structured body with a fraternal and revolutionary nature, characterized by democracy and grassroots revolutionary discourse. It is distinguished by the spirit of collective work, with collective leadership. It is far from any political affiliation, though members may take part in political parties. Being politically committed to the pro-people stance is one of the conditions for maintaining membership. Anyone who deviates or retreats from the committee’s people-centered, anticolonial political stance, especially the nonviolent approach to resistance, is expelled.

Each state has a coordinating body for all the resistance committees within it, and these coordinating bodies communicate across states. Communication among the resistance committees is more than just mere organizing and coordination of political action or revolutionary movement. Issues particular to one state are also discussed in other states, so that all can benefit collectively from these experiences and use collective thinking to make decisions after extensive discussion at the grassroots level.

The committees also expose many crimes committed against the Sudanese people that the ruling regime hides from the media, such as assassinations, arrests, and enforced disappearances of political and human rights activists. This is not very different from what representative bodies, professional unions, and civil organizations that are allies of the resistance committees do; all believe in the dreams and aspirations of our people.

Communication with political parties is more indirect. The degree of coordination between us and a political party varies based on its previous political stances and the party’s closeness to the masses and their issues. Many non-elite members of these political parties are also involved in the resistance committees and are committed to our political and revolutionary line; often they take political stances that are completely different from those of the elite leadership of their political party and are much more aligned with the glorious December Revolution and its goals.

The fall of the Salvation regime in April 2019 was followed by the June 3 massacre of people who had participated in a sit-in at the military headquarters in Khartoum. Violations by the security committee of the former regime continued, along with suppression of the movement and of the resistance committees’ activities. The military council that appointed itself the ruler of the state in April 2019 made it necessary for the revolutionary movement to find and innovate a formula that could achieve the dream of a civil democratic state — freedom, peace, and justice for which thousands of Sudanese people have sacrificed their lives. All past attempts failed to achieve this. It was necessary to develop an appropriate mechanism to reach this goal, crowning the long and arduous struggle of the daughters and sons of Sudan.

This mechanism lies in the people governing their own state as laid out in the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power, which ensures broad participation and the fair distribution of wealth. The 

 that resulted in the charter began in the small city of Mayerno, Sennar State, where all the resistance committees across the state participated in launching the first local charter. The resistance committees thoroughly 

Then the resistance committees across the states of Sudan continued the work, resulting in the Political Declaration of the resistance committees of Wad Madani, capital of Gezira State, and the Political Honor Charter from the joint committee in North Kordofan State. These two state charters formed the Revolutionary Charter for People’s Power, which was completed in February 2022 after intensive communication among the resistance committees to merge their experiences into a single charter.

The resistance committees in Khartoum issued 

the Charter for the Establishment of the People’s Authority

 in early 2022. As the goals of the December Revolution have always been the common factor that unites the resistance committees and other revolutionary forces, such as TAM [

], it was essential to translate these goals into a 

that every citizen could see themselves in. This was accomplished [in early 2023] despite difficulties and obstacles and with the significant support of Sudanese people in the diaspora.

The war that began on April 15, 2023, has shown that its sole goal is to permanently suppress the December Revolution. The Sudanese people and their revolutionary resistance forces demonstrated their resolve not to allow this to happen, however, proving that the December Revolution continues and will be victorious. Yet the reality is that this cursed war has significantly hindered the realization of the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power and forced the resistance committees to fulfill their humanitarian duty toward the people who have suffered and continue to suffer greatly from the violations committed by both sides of the war. Our members are occupied with relief and mutual aid work through the establishment of local emergency rooms, which assist citizens in war zones and areas of displacement. Despite safety concerns during wartime, the resistance committees have still managed to put forward a separate document articulating their view on ending the war called “

The path forward begins with this comprehensive postwar political vision for how to establish a suitable foundation for completing the glorious December Revolution and implementing what the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power calls for. The charter represents the compass for achieving a state of freedom, peace, and justice.

After the failure of all previous experiments by the governments that came on the heels of wars or revolutions, the authority of the people is the only guarantee for building a just state that can permanently eradicate the roots of those crises and wars. The people’s authority ensures fair representation and distribution of power and wealth and acts as the guardian of the country’s resources.

The responsibility for forming the people’s authority rests with the resistance committees, through the establishment of a temporary revolutionary council at the local, state, and federal levels to avoid fragmentation of civil institutions. The revolutionary council’s work continues until the formation of the transitional legislative council, which will oversee the drafting of the constitution and the selection of the executive body at all levels, including the prime minister. At that point the revolutionary council would immediately be disbanded.

To be able to exert real pressure on both sides of the war and their supporters, it is necessary to establish the people’s authority to address the international community, expose war crimes, speak on behalf of the Sudanese people, and to revoke any authority either side of the war claims over the country.

The Ongoing Fight for Freedom, Peace, and Justice in Sudan

Inspired by a need for more grounded, non-elite analyses of the current situation in Sudan, we interviewed four people whose organizing against the oppressive policies of the Sudanese state spans years and in some cases decades. Each of them links the revolution to the current war and foreground the organizing and collective visioning processes that have and could potentially still move us toward a popular democratic future in a post-war Sudan. We are incredibly grateful to them for speaking to us despite the circumstances that they face, including telecommunications and electricity blackouts in much of the country. In this first installment, you’ll read our introduction and an interview with Abdelraouf Omer, a Gezira farmer and union organizer.

If you would like to help grassroots civil society and mutual aid groups at the frontlines of relief efforts in parts of Sudan most impacted by state violence, donate to the 

t is now 15 months into the war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Yet the media attention Sudan receives does not reflect the monumental crisis it is facing and that threatens the broader region. When the mainstream media does cover Sudan, it tends to focus exclusively on the humanitarian catastrophe that the conflict has produced, which began on April 15, 2023, following the RSF and SAF’s joint Oct. 2021 coup. By contrast, grassroots organizers in Sudan tend to highlight the processes of marginalization, extraction, and militarization that make such a crisis productive for those in power.

The humanitarian reality is so devastating that the United Nations has described the suffering as “epic,” declaring Sudan “a nightmare for civilians.” International diplomacy and corporate extraction made this nightmare possible by legitimizing and keeping Sudan’s coup leaders in power, paving the way for this war. The unwillingness of the UN and the African Union, along with powerful entities such as the U.S. and European Union governments, to effectively leverage their power to stop the flow of arms and achieve a cease-fire is the latest example of why we cannot expect any kind of positive intervention from the state system and multinational institutions. Without a cease-fire, establishing safe passages and humanitarian corridors has proved elusive, as has stopping the targeting of civilians, first responders, journalists, homes, and remaining health and other critical infrastructure in an ever-expanding circle of bombings, burnings, sexual violence, and plunder. The suffering is epic because the world’s ethical and material failure to provide relief for those inside Sudan and fleeing across its borders has also been epic.

Sudanese protesters from Atbara make “V for victory” gestures as their train arrives in Khartoum, April 23, 2019. One of the earliest protests against ousted president Omar al-Bashir had erupted in Atbara in mid-December 2018. Photograph by Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images.

With every month, the catastrophe reaches new depths. The need for urgent attention and an immediate response remains. Yet thinking of humanitarianism alone masks the root causes of the violence, which are shaped by colonialism and racial capitalism. The desire to finally confront these historical forces gave rise to Sudan’s December Revolution in 2018, propelling the country into one of the most powerful movements for emancipation in the 21st century. The exclusion of the December Revolution and its demands, encapsulated in its slogan “Freedom, peace and justice,” from political discussions is not just a theoretical failing — it has had an effect on the ground, undermining people’s ability to exercise their agency to help themselves.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan has produced calamitous figures. 

 people have been displaced over the past year (including most of our families), with three million people crossing the border in increasingly desperate attempts to find refuge. Despite persistent warnings that famine is already underway, 

, less than 20 percent of the aid requested by the UN has been received. Looting, electricity outages and targeted attacks on farmers by the RSF has disrupted the planting season. The RSF has continued ethnic cleansing campaigns targeting the Masalit and other non-Arab groups in Darfur. In Darfur, Khartoum, and other areas of active fighting, sexual violence against women and girls is widespread and unaddressed. Across the country, 19 million children have lost access to education as state institutions collapse and defunct schools turn into shelters. As we write, El Fasher, capital of North Darfur and one of the country’s largest cities, is under a siege of bombardment and starvation not unlike Gaza’s. The dismal response by the so-called international community has been shameful and is shaped by anti-Black racism.

To be clear, the war is not purely an internal power struggle nor simply a proxy war of regional or “super” powers but a multi-scalar counterrevolutionary war supported by internal and external actors linked by capital and the desire to preserve the violent, extractive, ethno-nationalist, postcolonial Sudanese state. Western powers invite elite civilian actors, such as 

, to closed-door meetings at which they are asked to represent Sudanese civilians, where the focus is how to reach another agreement with the military and militias and to restore governance. The revolutionaries we are in touch with see the primary purpose of this war as overshadowing people-led visions and processes that were developed during the revolution.

To understand the war primarily through the lens of counterrevolution, it is important to situate it in Sudan’s recent political history, starting in 1989. That year the National Islamic Front, a political organization with distant roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, took power through a military coup d’état, establishing the regime headed by Omar al-Bashir and known in Sudan as the Inqaz, or Salvation, regime. It endured for nearly three decades, a period that saw an intensification of state violence against non-Arab communities in South Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile region, and, starting in 2003, Darfur, Sudan’s westernmost region. Just as a peace agreement was being negotiated to end the war in the south, paving the way for South Sudan’s independence, a genocidal war began in Darfur. With quelling the rebellion as a rationale, the regime unleashed the Janjaweed militias from pastoralist Arab groups in the region in a genocidal campaign against non-Arab communities. The result was the burning of thousands of villages, the displacement of millions, and the killing of hundreds of thousands.

Protesters hold a banner reading “The revolution is the choice of the people / [Town of] Thure, Al Khadraa, South Darfur / A caravan procession in support of the revolution / Security is the choice of the people,” Darfur, Dec. 2, 2020. Photograph by Faiz Abubakr.

Three decades of Salvation rule shifted the economy from its colonial basis of cash crops like cotton grown in large, centrally managed irrigation schemes to the production and export of crude oil. Below Abdelraouf Omer makes clear the devastating effect state policies had on rural livelihoods, including in his state, Gezira, a region in the so-called Arab heartland of Sudan, just a stone’s throw from Khartoum. Rents from oil and other sources became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the regime and its external clients, primarily but not exclusively Arab Gulf states. State institutions were purged of any opposition and populated with regime loyalists in a policy the regime called “Empowerment” (“Tamkeen”).

After independence, there were two major civic uprisings prior to 2018, in 1964 and 1985. Each brought down a military regime, only for the military to stage a coup d’état that returned it to power a few years later. War, genocidal campaigns, structural racism, repression of women and dissidents fueled grievances on a massive scale, as did mass unemployment facilitated by neoliberal privatization policies, land dispossession, and economic collapse. Resistance to the Salvation regime took many forms, both armed and unarmed, after 1989. Small civic uprisings in 2013 and 2016, triggered by austerity measures and price hikes after Sudan lost access to oil in South Sudan after its independence, were suppressed efficiently and brutally. But a key organizing tool, 

, emerged from those so-called failed uprisings.

In December 2018, protests over the exorbitant price of bread grew to include a whole host of social grievances and attracted broad segments of the population. What became known as the December Revolution coalesced into a unified demand for the fall not just of al-Bashir and his ruling party but of the military state as a whole. The core demand of the revolutionary movement became 

: full civilian rule, with the military removed from politics and the economy.

 forced the fall of al-Bashir and his ruling National Congress Party. In a bid to stabilize and maintain the military state, senior military officials formed a transitional military council that also included the RSF, a militia that al-Bashir had formed from the remnants of the Janjaweed militias. Negotiations with civilian political groups resulted in a power-sharing agreement between technocrats and opposition politicians and the military. The idea was that the military would eventually step away from power, and elections would be held for a fully civilian government.

This “transition” began in August 2019 and ended with the October 2021 coup by SAF and RSF, who were still allies. The elite civilian members of the transitional government had adopted neoliberal reforms rather than respond to the demands from the streets. One example is the 

 called the Abraham Accords, which the transitional government signed in January 2021 in exchange for being dropped from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and the promise of a $1 billion loan to clear its debt with the World Bank despite opposition from resistance committees and the public. The months that followed the coup saw frenetic attempts by the SAF to consolidate power countered by continued resistance to the military. At the same time, the revolutionary project accelerated, which saw intense work locally and nationally to build structures capable of developing a people’s vision of power. In 2022, resistance committees signed the 

Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power,

 a political document developed through a collective visioning process that maps out a popular democratic future from the bottom up.

After the coup, tensions between SAF and RSF grew, including over control of Sudan’s gold. After the loss of oil revenues with South Sudan’s independence in 2011, gold replaced oil as the biggest source of revenue for the regime. Sudan quickly became one of Africa’s biggest exporters of gold; 

 of that gold is smuggled out of the country. Most gold mines and distribution networks belong to the RSF or the military and other remnants of the Salvation regime. The 

 for the looted gold is the UAE; from there, it enters global markets. Russia and other countries have been stockpiling Sudanese gold. In return for gold, 

the UAE has been supplying the RSF with weapons

 that are smuggled into Sudan via Chad and Libya.

With a war that is first and foremost a product of the counterrevolution, the question becomes not when peace will come but what sort of peace. Will it be a peace based on power sharing between military and civilian elites, which will only temporarily halt the violence, or a true peace built on justice and a new bottom-up governance model that breaks with the past and dismantles existing systems of elite power and systematic appropriation? Despite this brutal war, millions of Sudanese people still insist, per a popular chant, “

The revolution is the people’s revolution. The authority is the authority of the people. The military belongs to the barracks, and the Janjaweed is to be dissolved

You can find a detailed timeline of Sudan’s recent history of revolution and counterrevolution 

A woman sits on a salvaged bed in an area devastated by floods in northern Sudan, Aug. 6, 2023. Photograph by Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images.

Abdelraouf Omer is a farmer and union organizer based in the town of Hassaheissa, in the agricultural Gezira region of central Sudan. He is a Middle East and North Africa representative of 

, an international peasant movement dedicated to defending food sovereignty and farmers’ rights. He is also a scholar focusing on the impact of the privatization policies of the Salvation regime on rural livelihoods and on the history of peasant and farmworker organizing. His latest research focuses on water waste in Sudan’s agricultural sector and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. He has been organizing, as part of the Coalition of Gezira and Managil Farmers, against the al-Bashir regime’s privatization of the Gezira scheme. Until the early 2000s, the scheme was one of the largest state-run irrigation projects in the world, relying on the labor of small landholding farmers and agricultural workers. Here he discusses the December Revolution and the current war, foregrounding state-sponsored land expropriation as key to understanding the counterrevolutionary violence engulfing the country.

 was born in the village of Faris Al Kitab to a family of wheat and cotton farmers in the heart of the Gezira irrigation scheme and acquired my farming skills at a very young age. Faris Al Kitab is known for its history of socialist organizing against colonial and postcolonial regimes since the 1940s. My father’s house was a gathering place for farmers to discuss their concerns vis-à-vis the state administrators of the scheme, because he held a role within it, representing their concerns. So I grew up surrounded by activism and by people airing their grievances against their employers and the state. I left Faris Al Kitab in the 1980s to become a teacher, first in Wadi Shaeer and then in Hassaheissa, where I joined the Communist Party and helped establish a teachers’ union that worked with other labor formations to reclaim power from the state-led Sudanese Socialist Union, which served the interests of the 

The December Revolution emerged in response to the accumulated impact of 30 years of the Salvation regime’s policies and arguably the decades of capitalist extractive policies that preceded it. Some of these policies, driven and recommended by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, focused on liberalizing the economy and privatizing the public sector. As a result, massive unemployment among workers, the professional class, and recent graduates became widespread. People suffered rampant poverty and hunger. A vast majority of Sudan’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small portion of the population, many of whom belonged to the ruling Islamist party. Through massive corruption, these elites managed to get hold of all the economic projects and production sites across Sudan, which they emptied of qualified staff. Positions in both the shrinking public sector and the expanding private sector were taken over by unqualified employees who belonged to the ruling party. This is how they gained control of most of the economy: companies, banks, factories, associations, etc. In the Gezira and other farming areas, the former regime targeted agricultural schemes and subsistence projects through privatization policies and restructured the workforce — as they did in the industrial and service sectors — in such a way that it lost important centers for organizing.

To manage and suppress the discontent that was produced through these policies, the regime fortified and expanded the security apparatus of the state, creating special security forces and opening torture houses and prisons, all of which were used to criminalize and suppress dissent under the ideological guise of political Islam. As the security state expanded in Sudan’s center, state violence escalated in the country’s marginalized regions of Darfur, the Southern Blue Nile region, and the Nuba Mountains. The state armed militias to suppress different forms of popular and armed resistance. In Darfur, this led to what is now known as a genocide against non-Arab communities. The state displaced millions of non-Arab Darfurian farmers in order to exploit the region’s gold and uranium. The international community intervened primarily to provide shelter and aid to displaced Darfurians, which ultimately cost less than the mineral wealth extracted by companies working with regime leaders. The current war is duplicating a similar process of violent extraction and is spreading it to other parts of the country.

A man walks through a house in Khartoum that was shelled during the war that broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Force, May 2023. Photograph by Faiz Abubakr.

This is the context in which the December Revolution emerged. A deepening economic crisis converged with the expansion and intensification of state violence in Sudan’s marginalized regions. This convergence gave rise to new forms of organized resistance and civil disobedience that attracted the masses. Drawing on their historical legacy of resistance to state elites, from the Mahdist Revolution of 1885 to the October Revolution of 1964 and the intifada of 1985, Sudanese people began to engage in various forms of protest in the 2010s, which eventually reached the capital in 2013. New strategies and tools of resistance emerged, paving the way for the revolution. These included not only protests and marches but also building public democratic organizations that aimed to regain the power that elites had taken from the people. It was then that the resistance committees were formed, accelerating a movement that had begun in rural areas and spread to Sudan’s cities, culminating in a massive sit-in in the capital, Khartoum. On April 11, 2019, the 113th day of the revolution, this movement overthrew Omar al-Bashir after 30 years in power. Beyond this moment, the revolution represented the awakening of the Sudanese people from the IDP [internally displaced persons] camps in Darfur in the west to Al-Damazin and Khashm El Girba in the east and the cities of the Gezira and Khartoum in the center, which had never seen demonstrations in the millions or witnessed a broadening of political tactics to include sit-ins, processions, barricades, public strikes, and boycotts.

The goal of the revolution was to dismantle the old regime politically, economically, and legally. The April 15 war aims to stop this. It serves the interests of a parasitic capitalist elite linked to and scaffolded by regional and international processes of imperialism that have destroyed all the means of production. Since the beginning of this war, the country has lost myriad light-industry factories and blacksmith and carpentry workshops in Khartoum state and beyond. Scores of buses, petrol stations, as well as 

, have been looted or destroyed. This impacts over a million workers, in addition to the hundreds of thousands employed in the informal sector of the economy.

The current war is a counterrevolutionary political and class struggle for authority and resources driven by the interests of global capital. These forces don’t mind replacing a totalitarian system, already rejected by the people, with a fake civil and democratic government adopting a neoliberal system controlled by elites, who will continue to rob and exploit Sudan’s human and natural resources. Land is at the center of this struggle. By land I mean soil but also water, livestock, forests, minerals, oil, and other resources that local, regional, and international elites have sought to control and exploit since ancient times. Of course, during the Turco-Egyptian colonial period, Sudanese resources served the ruling class in Egypt. At independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule in 1956, we essentially exchanged an extractive colonial system for an extractive global capitalist system.

The Gezira Scheme Act of 2005 was an important turning point for us as members of the Coalition of Gezira and Managil Farmers. After coming to power in 1989, the Inqaz regime had liberalized the economy through privatization. It dissolved unions and farmer cooperatives, attacked civil society organizations, and created laws to restrict people’s freedom. The 2005 act accelerated this process, particularly the takeover of the Gezira irrigation scheme. It facilitated the privatization and sale of all the scheme’s productive inputs: its offices, ginning mills, companies such as the Sudanese cotton company, agricultural machinery, storage facilities, warehouses, workers’ houses and so on were sold to mainly domestic private investors. This allowed state elites to begin buying up the land of small farmers, who had fallen into debt due to the withdrawal of state extension services and the privatization of the scheme.

As a coalition we organized against this under the slogan “No to privatization and no to the sale of the Gezira scheme’s land.” We presented an alternative to the 2005 act that included the creation and strengthening of small-farmer cooperatives. We put forward candidates in the 2005 local elections who won despite rigging but whose victory — though protected by a court ruling — was later rejected by the Registrar of Labor Organizations. We took legal action against the sale of our lands and against the distribution of expired seeds by the Sudanese cotton company, which had been taken over by the ruling party. Through a collective process developed over the course of seven gatherings, we developed a Charter for Land Justice. The charter proposes alternatives not only to the 2005 act but to the 1927 and 1984 Gezira scheme land acts that preceded it. It also opposes a 2011 law that replaced existing trade unions with associations that were taken over by wealthy farmers and capitalists. This takeover destroyed the workshops responsible for the upkeep and management of the scheme, including its irrigation networks, and transferred these responsibilities to private companies, which began selling off tractors, trucks, and digging equipment. Many are now being used in gold mining in other parts of the country.

Patients wait for treatment at a hospital in Wad Madani, Sept. 2, 2023. Photograph by Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images.

As the coalition grew, we also developed a political education wing. We produced booklets on (1) the history of the farmers’ movement from the 1946 strike to the present; (2) the environmental harm caused by pesticides and fertilizers, which have led to some of the highest rates of cancer and kidney disease in the country; and (3) the dangers of the laws and agricultural policies implemented under the Inqaz regime. During the revolution, we continued organizing around these issues and participated in attempts to reclaim land and productive inputs stolen by the former regime. We met with representatives of the transitional government, including Prime Minister Hamdok and the governor of Gezira state, to share our concerns and to present the alternatives we proposed in our charter. They did not take us seriously, and attempts by local officials to implement our ideas were met with delay tactics. As a result, land dispossession continued during the transition period and the land being farmed by small farmers shrank.

Just recently, Gezira small farmers gathered to prepare for the planting season while affirming that there can be no planting without security. We cannot farm if it means we risk being killed and looted and violated by the RSF. The coalition estimates that around 70 percent of farmers have been displaced by this war, and the numbers are increasing every day. The Gezira, and the agricultural sector more broadly, are in our view the key to development in Sudan. We cannot afford to hand it over to the capitalists who are waging and profiting from this war.

Hammer&Hope

Nisrin Elamin

@minlayla77

Contributions

Issue

5

The Ongoing Fight for Freedom, Peace, and Justice in Sudan

Issue

4

In Sudan, the People’s Revolution Versus the Elite’s Counterrevolution

FREE
TO READ

SIGN UP
TODAY

Nisrin Elamin

@minlayla77

Contributions

Issue

5

The Ongoing Fight for Freedom, Peace, and Justice in Sudan

Issue

4

In Sudan, the People’s Revolution Versus the Elite’s Counterrevolution

FREE TO READ

SIGN UP TODAY

FREE
TO READ

SIGN UP
TODAY