United States Still Strongarming ‘Democracy’ Onto Libya

MOCOA, Colombia—“We are experiencing a profound crisis, not only in the Amazon, but throughout [the world],” said Campo Elías de la Cruz, a Catholic priest and environmental activist. “Over three centuries, the umbilical cord of Mother Earth has been cut.”

De la Cruz, who opposes the extraction of minerals in Colombia’s Putumayo Department, referred to thousands of rubber trees that had been cut down, along with 70,000 Indigenous people who died in the western Amazon during the extraction of rubber, timber, oil and quinine (a substance used to prevent malaria). “And today,” de la Cruz told Toward Freedom, “in the 21st century, they tell us they are taking the copper from Mother Earth.” The priest remarked on contemporary plans to explore and mine for copper and molybdenum to feed “clean energy” technologies in what could be one of the largest deposits of these minerals on the continent and in the world.

In this richly biodiverse region, where the cool mountains of the Andes meet the steamy Amazon rainforest, opinions are divided and emotions fume over the environmental and social costs of housing a “green” mining project. It is here where the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers originate, both major tributaries of the Amazon River. Any alteration of the natural state of this area is likely to impact the entire Amazon rainforest, often referred to as the “lungs” of the Earth, for absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing life-giving oxygen into the atmosphere.

All this is why a Canadian mining company appearing to move forward on exploring mining possibilities in Putumayo has raised questions about a progressive government that won power by promising environmental protection.

‘Clean Energy’ Promises

In 2018, the Canadian multinational company Libero Copper and Gold acquired four mining titles to explore and extract minerals, such as copper and molybdenum, in more than 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) in Mocoa, the capital of the department of Putumayo in southern Colombia.

The proposal to extract copper and molybdenum has been framed by proponents as a “green” project that can help transition Colombia to using renewable energy and replace polluting fossil fuels, the use of which has been found to cause climate change. This proposal aligns with the policy of the progressive government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who took power last year. During his campaign, he vowed to stop issuing oil and gas exploration licenses and has recently advocated for the exploration of crucial minerals in the country to develop renewable energy as a climate change solution.

Libero Copper and Gold has gained support among locals—most of whom work with the company—because of the jobs and development it promises for a region that lacks access to basic services such as an adequate health system and a reliable water supply. However, the region’s history with oil extraction produced no benefits for the people, either, according to José Luis Lopez, a researcher at the Observatory of Environmental Conflicts at the National University of Colombia, in an interview with Toward Freedom.

“Currently, 46 percent of the economy of Putumayo depends on oil exploitation. Yet, between 2008 and 2016, formal employment only reached 26 percent,” Lopez said, citing a study carried out by Fedesarrollo for Ecopetrol, the largest oil company in the country.

In an effort to show how “green” this project is, Libero Copper and Gold created an alliance with the National University of Colombia in Medellin as part of their “Green Route” strategy. This alliance aims to create the first copper production chain in the country for the development of electric motors and generators. However, Congress members denounced the project because of conflicts of interests that led Vice-Minister of Mines and Energy Giovanny Franco Sepulveda to resign early this year.

According to Lopez, Libero Copper and Gold’s discourse lacks consistency. “First, they told us this could be the biggest mine in the world. Later, they focused on a strategy based on social responsibility and environmental sustainability. And, now, they present a plan to extract copper in small quantities.”

Libero Copper and Gold reported the reserves contain 4.6 billion pounds (2 million tons) of copper and 510.5 million pounds (232 kilotons) of molybdenum, exceeding the amount contained in the biggest mines in the world.

Beyond the environmental consequences, local people also worry this mining project could cause an environmental disaster similar to the one that took place in Mocoa in 2017, when intense rain led to a mudslide that caused the deaths of more than 300 people. Although the 2017 disaster was linked to the movement of Earth in a different area to where Libero Copper operates, geologists have confirmed that the mountain where the mining titles are located also contain highly fractured rocks and, therefore, are more susceptible to landslides.

“Energy transition should not under any circumstances put at risk the water supply of such an important region,” Lopez said. “If we affect the area where the water originates, and you also take into account the production of heavy metal residues, we are putting at risk communities whose survival depends on the rivers.”

Does Clean Energy Protect the Environment and Indigenous Territories?

In April, Petro opened his speech in front of the Organization of American States (OAS) by talking about Latin America’s strategic importance in producing critical minerals for the “clean energy” transition. According to the International Energy Agency, the area from Mexico in the north to Chile in the south accounts for 40 percent of global copper production and 35 percent of the world’s lithium. Yet, the reserves remain underdeveloped, which for some means a great potential exists to increase production––not only of these two materials––but also of others essential to the transition away from fossil fuels. Those can include nickel and rare earth elements, among others.

Despite a growing consensus on the importance of reducing carbon emissions, questions have arisen over who should bear the environmental and social costs of extracting resources essential to this transition. Indigenous and peasant communities in Colombia worry copper mining will affect their livelihoods and even force them to abandon their territories.

“I feel so much pain to see that a company like Libero Copper and Gold is coming to destroy the most precious thing we have, water,” said Rufina Valencia, an elderly peasant woman who arrived in the village––where Libero Copper and Gold operates––when she was a child. It was this land that helped her and her husband, who worked in the water company, raise their kids, she said. “[Water] is the heart of our community, our Putumayo region, and the world. Because Putumayo is the lung of the world.”

Petro’s victory during last year’s presidential elections was due to the overwhelming support of Indigenous and peasant communities, who saw Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez as allies in their struggle to defend land rights and protect their territories. This support, however, could come under scrutiny if mining interferes with their way of life.

“In different parts of the country, it has been proven how mining results in a loss of sovereignty over the lands of communities and loss over food sovereignty, as people abandoned agricultural practices to work in the mines,” explained Carlos Duarte, Coordinator of Rural Development and Land-Use Planning at Javeriana University in the capital of Bogotá, in an interview with Toward Freedom.

In this sense, Petro’s government could find itself in a tough spot as his plans to increase Colombia’s share in critical materials for a transition away from fossil fuels and toward a more independent Colombia could eclipse the interests of Indigenous and peasant communities.

Controversy Within the Government

So far, neither Petro nor Márquez have released a public statement about the copper and molybdenum mining project in Mocoa.

Although Márquez does not have political functions related to the mining sector, she is expected to be vocal on mining issues, explains Duarte. “Márquez has stated during her campaign––and as Vice President––her conviction that mining, as it is currently implemented, is not feasible,” he said. Toward Freedom contacted Márquez’s office, requesting a statement on this matter, but did not receive a response. “She has been part of this struggle her whole life and will probably not disassociate from this matter,” Duarte added.

However, the neoliberal extractivist policies implemented by governments of the first left-wing wave that engaged a socio-ecological discourse ––as was the case of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa ––show how these contradictory approaches have coexisted in the region.

According to Duarte, the Petro-Márquez government’s efforts to conserve the environment are obvious with the signing of the Escazú Agreement that aims to protect the environment and the lives of environmental activists. Although the agreement was signed in 2018, it was only until late last year that Colombia ratified it. The question remains of how the pair will move on the mining question. “Will they favor environmental protection or will they take an extractivist approach to satisfy the global demand for these resources?” Duarte asked.

For now, the Colombian government is revising the existing mining code—which many hope will toughen regulations and protect the environment. The Petro-Márquez administration has approved the National Development Plan 2022-26, in which the protection of water is one of the three central elements of territorial planning and its development strategy. A fact that Lopez also associates with the government’s willingness to protect the environment.

“The energy transition has an enormous demand for strategic minerals. At the global level, that means extraction frontiers are under pressure,” said Minister of Mines and Energy Irene Vélez when visiting Indigenous and local communities in March in Mocoa. “But this government is not going to generate a copper rush that will leave social and environmental destruction.”

On various occasions, the National Mining Agency (or ANM in Spanish) has stated that the company cannot conduct any exploration or exploitation activities due to the 020 Regional Accord prohibiting medium and large-scale mining in Mocoa. However, the company has violated this accord by carrying out exploration activities. Such violations are verifiable on the company’s website, where they report on their activities. On this matter, the ANM is conducting an investigation but so far has not presented its findings.

In response to Toward Freedom‘s inquiry regarding the investigation, the agency said the process is still underway. However, this exceeds the time limit set forth in Article 288 of the Mining Code.

For now, Libero Copper and Gold continues operating in the territory and the people refuse to relent.

“I will not sell my land because I don’t want future generations to say they were left in a desert, impossible to survive because of my decision,” said Valencia, who has lived in Putumayo since childhood. “But if that project continues, we worry we will be forced to sell when the water is contaminated.”

The video above was first published by Mongabay.

The arrest of journalist Roman Protasevich after his flight was diverted May 23 to the Belarusian capital of Minsk has generated more negative publicity for Belarus’ government and has raised questions about the extent of the new Cold War.

Protasevich, 26, is editor of outlawed Telegram channels that had stirred opposition to President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994. Telegram is a messaging application used on smartphones. High-profile individuals, media outlets and organizations also use it to broadcast one-way communications to their followers.

After the arrest, the Biden administration announced it would re-impose economic sanctions on state-owned companies in Belarus, and that it would add names to the list of sanctioned officials associated with “ongoing abuses of human rights and corruption.”

Dismissing Lukashenko’s claim that Protasevich’s flight contained a bomb threat, the New York Times editorialized that Lukashenko had “gone too far” in “hijacking a commercial airliner to kidnap an opposition journalist.” Aside from urging the U.S. response be “swift,” the Times referred to Lukashenko’s attempt as a “Jason Bourne plot.”

However, when former Bolivian President Evo Morales’ flight was forced to land in Vienna in 2013 because U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden was thought to be on board, the incident was dismissed as a mistake.

Belarus is one of the last remaining socialist countries in the world and a close ally of Russia, a country the United States has targeted for decades via the first “Cold War”—when it was the former Soviet Union—and thereafter with neoliberal policies and NATO troops at its border. This puts Belarus particularly at risk for U.S. subversion.

The U.S. government has funded opposition movements against Lukashenko, who has been caricatured as a brutal dictator and a “throwback to the regional bosses of the Soviet era,” as the Times depicted him.

While some aspects of the criticism are accurate, Lukashenko has a considerable degree of popular support in Belarus because he resisted Western-imposed privatization programs in the 1990s and preserved a social safety net, resulting in low poverty and inequality levels.

The opposition movement has been depicted heroically even though it was photographed during anti-regime protests in August flying the pre-revolutionary flag, implying its goal was to reverse socialist-type economic programs.

 

Far-Right Links

Some of its members have ties to far right-wing networks in Europe that went unreported in the media.

A May 26 profile in the Times depicted Protasevich as a precocious young man who had bravely “resisted his country’s tyranny since he was 16” when he “first witnessed what he described as the ‘disgusting brutality’ of Mr. Lukashenko’s rule.”

His first arrest came when he watched a “clapping protest”—considered an offensive gesture in Belarus—against Lukashenko, causing him to be expelled from high school and his mother to resign as an army academy teacher.

After being forced to abandon his university studies, Protasevich became an opposition journalist in Poland, helped establish a Telegram channel to resist Lukashenko and joined forces with opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania.

Left out of the fawning portrait was Belarusian courts had determined the Telegram channels he had worked for, Belamova and Nexta, were “extremist” and first set up by people such as Igor Losik, who had served as consultants with the U.S. propaganda organ, Radio Free Europe.

Protasevich furthermore enlisted in a militia that fought alongside the neo-Nazi Azov battalion in eastern Ukraine against Russian backed separatists, was wounded in battle and reportedly worked for the Azov battalion’s press service.

 

Protasevich’s selfie in an explicitly neo-Nazi brand Sva Stone. It’s extremely unlikely that one can wear these T-shirts without being “in”. pic.twitter.com/brpsUgEpPw

— Volodymyr Ishchenko (@Volod_Ishchenko) May 26, 2021

Photographed in a T-shirt featuring far-right iconography, Protasevich is even suspected of being the young man featured with an assault rifle and military uniform on the front of Azov’s propaganda magazine, which is emblazoned with a large neo-Nazi symbol.

 

Media’s Anti-Russia Bias

Fitting a century-long pattern of Russophobia, the Times has led the charge for a new Cold War against Russia and has supported regime change in Belarus.

When protests broke out over a contested election last summer, the Times erroneously predicted Lukashenko’s downfall many times, and in April chose not to report on a coup as well as an assassination plot led by an opposition politician holding a U.S. passport.

The biased coverage of Belarus has extended to alternative media like Counterpunch.

On May 31, it ran an article by an anti-Lukashenko playwright, Andrei Kureichik, titled “The Taking of Roman Protasevich,” which used hyperbolic language in characterizing Belarus as a “terrorist and criminal state.” In another exaggeration, Kureichik claimed Lukashenko had established “open air concentration camps” by “employing military weapons and special equipment against peaceful civilians without restrictions or liability.”

No mention was made of Protasevich’s ties to the Azov battalion in the article, nor about foreign backing of the anti-Lukashenko movement. The latter was confirmed by Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus, who tricked Nina Ognianova, a National Endowment for Democracy (NED) senior European program officer, into admitting the NED had trained and funded the leaders of the protest movement that was working to overthrow Lukashenko.

After writing a book about U.S. bombardiers in World War II titled, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team, famed author John Steinbeck wrote: “We were all part of the war effort… correspondents were not liars, but it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.”

These words apply very well to corporate media outlets—and sometimes even to the alternative press—when it comes to their coverage of Belarus, where it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of four books on U.S. foreign policy including, Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again (Monthly Review Press, 2018), with John Marciano.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.

Country-wide anti-coup demonstrations were underway once again in Sudan on Monday, December 26, a week after the previous “March of Millions” on December 19, during which 499 protesters were injured by the security forces in the three cities of Khartoum state alone. Sudanese have been protesting across the country against the power-sharing framework agreement signed earlier between the junta and right-wing political parties, and calling for the complete overthrow and prosecution of the leaders of the October 2021 coup.

Of the nearly 500 people who were injured on December 19, 226 had to be rushed to hospitals for treatment, while others were treated by medical volunteers on the field, according to the Association of Socialist Doctors.

Another doctor’s group, Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD), estimated the total injuries treated in hospitals to be 155 in Khartoum State, and added that two of them with gunshot wounds had to be stabilized with surgeries. One protester is reported to have lost an eye.

Deliberately “targeting the eye,” “aiming tear gas canisters directly at the head,” and stun-grenade attacks on protesters who were already blinded by and choking on tear gas were systematic, CCSD added. Most of the injuries, 120 of them, were in the country’s capital Khartoum city, followed by its twin cities of Omdurman and Khartoum Bahri (North).

Demonstrations were also reported from at least 16 other cities outside Khartoum, including Wad Madani, capital of Al Jazirah state, Port Sudan, capital of Red Sea state, Atbara in River Nile state, and even capitals of civil war-affected states of South Kordofan and South Darfur.

The day marked the fourth anniversary of the start of the December Revolution in 2018. By April 2019, the mass protests had led to the overthrow of dictator Omar al Bashir who had been in power for nearly three decades. The Revolution did not stop, however, and continued the struggle against his inner circle of generals who had formed a military junta.

After a massacre on June 3, 2019, right-wing parties—a coalition calling itself the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC)—entered into a power-sharing agreement with the military, forming a joint civilian-military transitional government in August 2019.

While maintaining control over much of the economy and foreign policy, the military ceded some power to civilian leaders chosen by the FFC parties for a period under this deal, before taking it back in a coup in October 2021. Soon after, the FFC parties opened another round of negotiations with the junta, and signed the framework agreement on December 5. This is said to be the first step toward a final agreement to pave the way for another transitional government.

In the meantime, relentless mass-demonstrations have continued since the coup. Led by Resistance Committees (RCs)—a network of over 5,000 of which are organized in neighborhoods across the country—hundreds of thousands have been taking to the streets several times nearly every month under the slogan, “No negotiation, No Compromise, No Partnership.” Thousands have been injured and over 120 killed in the crackdown on these protests.

On December 19, protesters in Khartoum, carrying portraits of those killed in the repression and waving national flags, once again marched to the Presidential Palace—the seat of coup leader and army chief Abdel Fattah al Burhan—amid the barrage of tear gas, stun grenades, and live bullets fired by security forces.

The marches in the capital city originated from 12 different locations and pushed toward the Presidential Palace along six separate routes, with some protesters reportedly getting as close as 1.5 kilometers (close to 1 mile) to the junta’s seat of power.

In an attempt to prevent the protesters from the capital’s twin cities of Omdurman and Khartoum Bahri from joining forces with those marching towards the Palace, security forces blocked the bridges over the Nile with large containers well before the start of the demonstrations.

“Early in the morning, the police had barricaded all the main roads of Omdurman with barbed wire and armored police vehicles. All over the city, the police were deployed in massive numbers. They fired hundreds and hundreds of stun grenades on the protesters,” said Osama Saeed, a member of the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), who was among the protesters rallying in Omdurman.

He further claimed that many of the tear gas canisters were filled with stones and crushed glass, which, on exploding, sprayed shrapnel, injuring several at once. 82 different injuries were recorded in Omdurman, according to the Socialist Doctors. One young woman is reported to have lost her eye.

No Credibility

“[A]dherence to international human rights charters, especially charters of women’s rights… and protecting… freedoms of peaceful assembly and expression,” were commitments the coup leaders had made in the framework agreement with the FFC. The agreement assures that the “transitional authority” established after the final agreement would be “a full democratic civil authority without the participation of the regular forces.”

However, “the FFC political parties have signed six documents with the junta. None of them was respected by the junta,” Fathi Elfadl, national spokesperson of the SCP, told Peoples Dispatch. “Every time mass movements force the military to retreat, they buy time by signing such agreements with right-wing parties, and then violate them,” he added.

While the agreement makes way for a civilian prime minister and cabinet, Elfadl said that the real levers of power will nevertheless be held by what is envisaged in the agreement as the “Security and Defense Council.”

The agreement states that this body, consisting of the leaders of the security forces and of the six armed formerly rebel movements—those who signed the Juba agreement and went on to support the coup after getting a share in state power—will be headed by the Prime Minister. It declares that the civilian head of state is the supreme commander of the armed forces.

However, coup leader al-Burhan clarified to the media soon after signing the agreement that the “civilian Supreme Commander of the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces)” neither “presides over the army chief” nor appoints him, but “only approves recommendations made to him.”

The agreement “prohibits regular forces from engaging in investment and commercial activities, except for those related to military manufacturing and military missions.” However, the army chief cautioned, “Do not listen to what politicians say about military reform… no one will interfere in the affairs of the army at all.” Matters of military reform are in any case only stated in principle in this agreement. The modalities will only be spelt out in the final agreement.

Regularizing a Notorious Militia

The formation of a single unified army and the disarmament and dissolution of all militias have been key demands of the pro-democracy movement since 2019. This is especially applicable to the notorious Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which carried out the massacre of June 3, 2019, and whose members are the soldiers who committed the atrocities in Darfur during the civil war under Bashir.

While Bashir stands trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, his footsoldiers, organized as the RSF, not only continue what has been called a depopulation campaign in mineral-rich Darfur, but also police the protesters in Khartoum.

This militia, which controls over a billion dollars in finances, is headed by the military junta’s vice-president, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, who will continue to be a powerful figure in the Security and Defense Council.

The framework agreement states that the RSF “will be integrated into the armed forces according to agreed timetables”. However, it also recognizes the RSF as a separate entity, terming it a “military force affiliated with the armed forces.”

Saeed said that the agreement is in effect regularizing the RSF as “a special force of the army,” which will effectively continue to operate autonomously instead of ensuring its Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) as demanded by the pro-democracy movement.

He added that the agreement also makes a mockery of another central demand: the prosecution of all military generals and officers responsible for the massacre on June 3, 2019, and for all other atrocities, including war-crimes, committed since 1989 after the Bashir’s coup.

“Transitional justice,” the agreement states, “is an issue that needs the participation of the stakeholders and the families of the martyrs, provided that it includes all those who have been affected by human rights violations since 1989 until now.”

This is a “manipulation of the whole concept of justice, shifting the burden on to the victims and families of martyrs,” said Saeed. “What they are essentially saying is, the state is not responsible for any crimes, only individuals are. If someone got shot while protesting on the street, it is not the responsibility of the state, but of the individual soldiers or police or militiamen carrying out this action. So victims must cooperate with the state to help identify them. But the state and its high command will always be protected.”

‘The Juba Agreement Has Failed’

The implementation of the Juba peace agreement is another commitment in the framework agreement that the SCP and many other sections of the pro-democracy movement are radically opposed to. While the leaders of the armed rebel groups who signed the agreement have made peace with the army and the RSF in exchange for a share in state power and even went on to support their coup, peace has remained elusive for the people in the war-affected regions.

Since the Juba agreement in October 2020, hundreds of thousands have been displaced and several hundreds killed in massacres by the RSF and other militias it backs in Darfur, whose governorship has been handed over to a former rebel leader Minni Minnawi.

Communal clashes have also been engineered by the junta in the Blue Nile State by pitting tribes against each other, allegedly with the connivance of Malik Agar, a former rebel leader who signed the Juba agreement.

“The Juba agreement has failed. It is not only the Communist Party and the Resistance Committees seeing this – everybody knows. The displaced people living in camps, the refugees, are all suffering the further deterioration of security since the agreement. Massacres, rapes, and other atrocities are worse than before the agreement,” Elfadl said.

“We don’t need this agreement between leaders of military and armed groups. We need an agreement between people who have a real interest in bringing peace – between the representatives of the displaced people living in camps, the Resistance Committees and the civil society in Darfur. None of them were represented in the agreement.”

These groups, he said, must be brought together to address the roots of the conflict in a new agreement, addressing the question of facilitating the return of displaced people to their lands, the distribution of resources, and the disarmament of RSF and other militias. Without this process, he insisted, peace can never be realized in the troubled peripheries of Sudan.

Without addressing these contested issues of peace and justice, the agreement rushes headlong into an election at the end of the transitional period, which is to conclude two years from the date of the appointment of the Prime Minister.

Foreign Powers, Right-Wing Parties and the Junta Combine Forces

Saeed calls it the “Egyptian model,” referring to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who, after taking power in a military coup 2013, went on to legitimize his power grab by winning a “sham election” with over 96 percent of the votes in 2014. He has been Egypt’s authoritarian ruler since. Egyptian intelligence agents are “always around al-Burhan. They now even have an office in Sudan’s military headquarters,” Saeed said.

The Egyptian state, as well as the neighboring Gulf countries that are backing this deal, see the December Revolution as a threat not only to their interests in Sudan, but also to their own regimes domestically, he explained. These autocratic regimes, he said, fear that a successful revolution in Sudan might inspire the people of their own countries to revolt.

The United States, United Kingdom and European Union countries backing this domestically unpopular agreement also “prefer a military dictatorship” that they can use to advance their own interests in the country, located in a geopolitically crucial place on the Red Sea, Saeed argued.

“However, the Americans and their allies see the power of the streets. They see that the military junta has been paralyzed by the mass movement, and is not able to run the country. The situation today is that there is a junta on the top, but there is effectively no government to administer the country. So the Western powers and their regional allies hammered the right wing parties of the FFC to sign a deal with the military in an attempt to stabilize power in the country by hook or by crook.”

The stabilization of what will essentially remain military rule by simply giving it a civilian face is the goal of holding such an election, he said. Without the trials of the generals involved in the coups and other crimes since Bashir’s ascent in 1989, without first ensuring peace in the peripheral regions, any election—conducted in the absence of the right to organize, assemble, and express oneself freely—will be meaningless, he insisted.

“Even if the communists win such an election, they will not be able to accomplish anything,” because state power will still be held hostage by the forces of the dictatorship, Saeed said.

However, a consolidation of the authoritarian state through the alliance of the military, right-wing political parties, and foreign powers is far from certain, given internal contradictions.

The FFC split last month, and its constituent parties and armed rebel groups are currently squabbling over who should and should not be party to the agreement. In the meantime, their attempt to divide the mass movement with this agreement – with which they hoped to take a section of people off the streets from the protests – has “clearly failed,” said Saeed.

Pointing out that even rank-and-file members of the FFC are taking part in the protests against this framework agreement, he questioned what authority FFC leadership had to negotiate with the military.

“To negotiate, there should be a balance of power. The FFC has nothing. They don’t have the backing of the mass movements. Their own cadres are opposing the deal. That is why their leaders are found every night in the house of the Saudi Ambassador,” he said.

“They are relying on the backing of foreign powers to negotiate, but foreign powers are only interested in stabilizing the situation, even if it is on the terms of the military, so long as their interests are served.”

And the interests of the foreign powers are not unified either, added Elfadl. The UAE, which has “very strong relations” with Hemeti and the companies associated with his RSF, secured a $6 billion deal to construct a port in the Red Sea soon after the framework agreement. “This definitely goes against the interests of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt, which is very closely allied with Bashir and his loyal generals in the army.”

The contradictions among foreign powers backing the consolidation of power in Sudan are also escalating the internal contradictions, including between the army and the RSF, he said. “Army officers are wary of integrating RSF among their ranks. The RSF, on the other hand, has been recruiting officers suspended from the army for one or the other reason.”

Unify the Resistance

In the face of attempts by this alliance of forces with contradictory interests to consolidate into a unified authoritarian state in Sudan, the main task is to unify the resistance, Elfadl said. “What we are trying to do now is to build a network for cooperation and coordination between the political activities of the Resistance Committees and the task of organizing a trade union movement.”

The first phase of the December Revolution, culminating in the overthrow of Bashir in 2019, was in fact spearheaded by the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), a coalition of trade unions, organized underground during his dictatorship.

However, after the formation of the joint civil-military transitional government, “we made a mistake,” he said. “The SCP and progressive movements had agreed that the next immediate task was to bring into force labor laws,” on the basis of which the trade union movement can be formally established.

“However”, with the failure to secure these labor laws under the former transitional government in which the military continued to have the greater share of power, “it proved to be the wrong approach. Since 1948, the working class and professionals in Sudan never had labor laws” to sanctify their unions. “Nevertheless, they called their general assemblies and organized their forces into a trade union movement, regardless of the law. This was the tradition, from which we had wrongly deviated recently.”

Arguing that “it is the right of the working class to organize themselves into unions,” Elfadl said, “we will organize the trade unions in accordance with the ILO conventions,” irrespective of labor laws (or the lack of it) in Sudan. The several separate strikes currently underway in the country makes the time fertile, and the task all the more urgent, argued Elfadl.

“This work must go hand in hand with the implementation of the proposals of the Resistance Committees for continued action on the streets. From this, the unity of action will emerge,” he said, adding that the SCP will strive to “unify the trade unions, Resistance Committees and the civil society on a common charter for the building of civil-democratic authority.”

Appealing for “international solidarity to stop the repression, and to force the junta to respect human-rights and the right to demonstrate”, Elfadl asserted, “the rest are tasks the mass-movement in Sudan is capable of achieving itself. It will defeat all the reactionary schemes, be it of international or local forces.”