The UN Integrated Transitional Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS), the African Union and the trilateral mechanism of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) have started this Saturday a round of conferences in Sudan where they will consider a transitional justice process to address crimes committed by the dictatorship of the deposed Omar al Bashir, key to the difficult transition talks in the African country.
The figure of Al Bashir, deposed in 2019 after a popular revolution with military support, and now imprisoned in Khartoum, continues to cast a long shadow in Sudan.
The country is now ruled by a military junta accused of dozens of deaths during a recent wave of repression, and under the skepticism of the same civilian groups that encouraged the uprising against the dictator, some of which are involved in a parallel transition process under Egyptian auspices.
These groups consider essential the existence of a process to purge responsibilities of thirty years of dictatorship, hence the importance of the conference starting this Saturday, spread in several cities of the country and attended by civil society organizations, national experts and the more than 40 signatories of the Framework Agreement of December 5, which in principle is the »official» process developed by the military to hand over power.
After completing the regional workshops, a National Conference for Transitional Justice will begin in the capital, Khartoum, in the hope of bringing together the Army and an organization instrumental in the fall of Al Bashir, the Forces for Freedom and Change, who suspect the presence of Al Bashir’s allies in the junta that leads the country, headed by Abdelfatá al Burhan, reports Radio Dabanga.
It should be recalled that this organization is not the only one that has expressed its suspicion towards the military. In fact, the Sudanese Army has had to start in the last weeks a mediation process with the main paramilitary group of the country, the Rapid Intervention Forces, after the criticisms expressed by the leader of this organization, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias ‘Hemedti’, to the course of the current transition process in the country.
Dagalo last month showed again his disagreement with the course the transition process is taking in Sudan, in his opinion a »mistake» which »has opened the door to a return of the old regime» of dictator Al Bashir.
The declarations of the leader of the RSF, a paramilitary force closely linked to the transcendental events that the African country has gone through until the consolidation of the current military junta, occurred at an extremely delicate moment of the transition process that the country is going through after decades of dictatorship, in view of the appearance of the parallel peace process in Cairo, discouraged by Sudan’s western allies, with the EU at the head, in order not to muddy the talks even more.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
