Streets empty in Sudan's capital after deadly army crackdown

Young journalists club

News ID: 40343
Publish Date: 14:51 - 04 June 2019
TEHRAN, Jun 4 - Streets in the Sudanese capital were empty on Tuesday, a day after a pro-democracy sit-in was violently overrun by the country's ruling military authorities, who say they want to stage early elections within months.

Streets empty in Sudan's capital after deadly army crackdownTEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - Protest organizers say 35 people died in the carnage Monday.

The military's move to hold a vote so soon cancels all its agreements with protest leaders, who for months had been camped outside the military headquarters in Khartoum as the two sides negotiated over who would run the country after the April ouster of longtime strongman Omar al-Bashir.

The military council's head, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, said the military will move to form an interim government to prepare for elections, which he said would be internationally supervised. A written version of his televised speech released in a statement said elections would be held within seven months, however, in the broadcast, he said elections would be within nine months. The different timelines could not immediately be reconciled.

An Associated Press journalist saw protesters still building up barricades in the suburbs of Khartoum, even as security forces in the city center were not allowing any access to the former sit-in site, setting up checkpoints around the area.

Mohammed Yousef al-Mustafa, a spokesman for the Sudanese Professionals' Association, which has spearheaded the protests, said: "We are rejecting what Burhan said. Now, they have proved that they are a military coup."

He called for the international community and the U.N. Security Council not to recognize Burhan or the military authorities and put pressure on the generals to hand over power to a civilian-led authority. The U.N. Security Council is set to discuss the crackdown in Sudan on Tuesday afternoon in a closed-door session requested by the United Kingdom and Germany.

Source: AP

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