Military detain Sudanese prime minister, Abdullah Hamdok, and seize control in Sudan

The Sudan Army has given this Monday a coup that materializes the rebound in political tensions in recent weeks, which warned of the imminence of a new coup. Finally, the Army has dealt a coup with the arrest of Prime Minister Abdala Hamdok and several ministers and members of the Sovereign Councilas well as the vice president of the former rebel group Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), Yasir Arman, currently an adviser to the prime minister.

The Ministry of Information has indicated that Hamdok has been arrested at his home and taken “to an unknown location” after a group of soldiers surrounded his home and after refusing to express public support for the coup.

The coup is a hard setback to the transition process opened in 2019 after the overthrow in another coup of the then president, Omar Hasan al Bashir.

Sudan until now had transitional authorities that came out of an agreement between the military and civilians after the overthrow of Al Bashir and that had launched a battery of reforms and even achieved a historic peace agreement in October 2020 with some of the main rebel groups in the country.

Likewise, the transitional authorities reached an agreement for the delivery to the International Criminal Court (ICC) of Al Bashir and other accused of war crimes and crimes against Humanity during the conflict in Darfur, without materializing so far.

However, the last two years have been marked by various tensions between the civilian and military components of the authorities, due to differences of opinion about the priorities or the pace of the transition process.

Political tensions materialized in recent days in a series of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in favor of the Army and civil authorities, while Hamdok called for a “dialogue” to “look to the future instead of drowning in the details of the last”.

Likewise, he stressed that the prime minister had called on the population to “occupy the streets” to “defend the revolution”, which has been followed by a series of mobilizations in Khartoum who have been repressed by the security forces, who have come to open fire on the concentrates, leaving, at least twelve injured.

Shortly after, the leader mlitar Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan has materialized the coup when announcing the dissolution of the Sovereign Council and the Government, in addition to decreeing the state of emergency. Thus, he has argued that the decision has been adopted to “preserve” the revolution after the latest demonstrations, including a sit-in by hundreds of people to demand that the Army seize power.

Hamdok’s office has denounced “a rupture of the constitutional document” and “a blow against the advances of the revolution for which the people sacrificed themselves to seek freedom, peace and justice”, amid calls for calm and containment by the international community, which has claimed to preserve the constitutional order.

Sudan has been the scene of numerous military coups since it gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1956, including the one that brought Al Bashir to power in 1989, also overthrown through a coup in 2019.