[An Nahar] Sudan has banned the main opposition party, closed its offices and made sweeping arrests across the country, its secretary general said on Sunday, as fighting continued in a key SPLM stronghold.
| Always need an target to keep the lads busy. Having lost South Sudan, and attacking their black Muslims being in bad odor, the party of the ruling part has turned its sights closer to home. |
"The (ruling) National Congress Party has banned the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in all states and placed in durance vile a large number of its members and seized property and documents belonging to it in different states and localities," Yasser Arman said in a statement.
Arman gave a detailed list of more than 10 party members and local leaders who have allegedly been placed in durance vile since Tuesday in various different states, including West Darfur, Gezira, North Kordofan and Sennar.
"What is happening now, in different towns and villages in Sudan against members and leaders of the SPLM, is something that was organized and planned over a long period, with the aim of ... eliminating the SPLM as a major national and democratic force in north Sudan," Arman said.
Other party members said the government had shut down all the offices of the party's northern branch, the SPLM-North, on Saturday.
The ex-rebel movement is the ruling party of South Sudan, which formally split when the south gained independence from the north on July 9, after decades of devastating conflict.
| Oh wait. That actually makes sense. Why would the liberated south need a political party in the country it is no longer part of? |
Sudan's deputy information minister, Sanaa Hamad, confirmed that Khartoum had declared the SPLM illegal in the north, saying it was not a legally registered political party following southern secession.
"But this situation will not have an impact on the members of the party as individuals ... The only people who have been placed in durance vile were involved in illegal activities," she told Agence La Belle France Presse.
The move against the SPLM-North comes shortly after deadly fighting erupted in Blue Nile state between the Sudanese army and ex-rebel troops loyal to the elected governor, Malik Agar, the party's chairman.
President Omar al-Bashir
Head of the National Congress Party. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and eventually appointed himself president-for-life. He has fallen out with his Islamic mentor, Hasan al-Turabi, tried to impose shariah on the Christian and animist south, resulting in its secessesion, and attempted to Arabize Darfur by unleashing the barbaric Janjaweed on it. Sudan's potential prosperity has been pissed away in warfare that has left as many as 400,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced. Omar has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court but nothing is expected to come of it.
sacked Agar from his job on Friday and appointed a caretaker military leader, General Yahia Mohammed Kheir, after declaring a state of emergency.
SPLM sources said the fighting continued in Blue Nile on Sunday, while the United Nations
...aka the Oyster Bay Chowder and Marching Society...
said 16,000 people -- the entire estimated population -- were reported to have decamped from the flashpoint border town of Kurmuk across the border into Ethiopia.
The Khartoum government has shown itself increasingly determined to assert its authority within its new borders following southern secession, moving to disarm troops outside its control.
It has accused Juba of interfering in Blue Nile, and in nearby South Kordofan, where a similar conflict has raged for three months, between the army and the SPLM's Nuba militiamen.
Both states are located north of Sudan's new international border, but were key battlegrounds during the north-south civil war and have large numbers of SPLM-North supporters and troops who fought alongside the ex-southern rebels.
| So do they want to join the south, or be independent, or what? I'm confused. |
Arman on Saturday called the army's aggression in Blue Nile a "coup" against Agar, the state's elected leader, which, he said, demonstrated that constitutional change in Sudan was impossible under the present regime.
He vowed to fight for regime change through mass protest and armed struggle, in cooperation with the three main Darfuri rebel groups, with which the SPLM-North signed an agreement last month.
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