Remember when the fucking Notre Dame burned down and everyone knew instantly and it was over every single news outlet?
Well there’s been a massacre going on in Sudan for DAYS and NOBODIES COVERING IT!
So there is currently a media blackout in Sudan to try and coverup the horrors taking place:
Stop what you’re doing and please reblog this. Innocent people are being murdered, people are trapped, have no internet access, and are being raped by the dozens on the streets of Sudan.
The death toll is estimated to be over 300 civilians. And the fact that not a single major news outlet is covering this is horrific and disgusting. Please help get the word out about Sudan!
On Monday June 3 before dawn, the military regime and its thugs
brutally dispersed the sit-in which had been camping outside the
military headquarters in Sudan’s capital Khartoum since April 6, and
which had served as the focal point for the ongoing uprising that
brought down long-time dictatorial President Omar al-Bashir.
This counter-revolutionary move was carried out by security forces
and an array of reactionary militias, in particular the so-called ‘Rapid
Support Forces’ (RSF). These violent paramilitary troops were
officially established in 2013 to become al-Bashir’s praetorian guard.
They are offspring of the tribal Janjaweed militia, who built a
notorious reputation through mass killings, rapes, lootings and
countless other atrocities during the war in Darfur more than a decade
ago.
Importing these methods straight into the heart of the capital, the
RSF militiamen went on a murderous rampage across the city, torching the
tents at the sit-in, raping women, shaving the heads of protestors with
razors, flogging them with whips, chasing, beating up and mugging
unarmed civilians in the streets, shooting live ammunition in hospital
wards, looting shops…Similar violence, although on a smaller scale, was
unleashed in Port Sudan, Sinar, Atbara and many other places. Video
footages on social media are bearing witness to the ongoing violence
used by the RSF, in Khartoum and other cities.
The Sudanese Doctors’ Committee has put the provisional death toll at
over a hundred people, to be added to the many hundreds injured. It is
likely, however, that the real figure for Monday’s bloody crackdown is
much higher. A credible intelligence source with connections to the
security apparatus reported to a Sudanese journalist that “some people
were beaten to death and thrown in the Nile, some shot multiple times
and thrown in the Nile and others were hacked with machetes and thrown
in the Nile. It was a massacre.” Since then, about 40 bodies of dead
protesters have been pulled out of the river.
Fear of revolution
Through this barbaric repression, the military junta who usurped
power after the fall of al-Bashir tried to instil terror among the
masses and to strike a serious blow to the revolutionary struggle that
has shaken the country since December 2018. The use of rape, for
example, is aimed at crushing the spirit of resistance of the many
Sudanese women who have invariably been at the first line of the
revolutionary mobilisations, and played a key role in braving the
humiliations the old regime visited upon them.
Before Monday’s crackdown, the head of the so-called ‘Transitional
Military Council’ (TMC), General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy
General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the RSF, visited Cairo, Riyadh
and Abu Dhabi. This was presumably to receive the green light,
assistance and advices of al-Sisi, the butcher of the Egyptian
revolution, and of the reactionary monarchs in the Gulf, the main
regional backers of the TMC, for Monday’s murderous onslaught. All are
dreaming of restoring a ruthless dictatorship in Khartoum that could
drown the Sudanese revolution in blood, put to sleep any revolutionary
temptations that might develop in their own backyards, and carry on with
providing them cannon fodder for their war in Yemen.
The timing of these dramatic events is indeed not fortuitous. The
inspiring revolutionary struggle of the Sudanese masses reached last
week a new dimension with a solid two-day general strike which brought
the country to a complete halt. The success of that strike, displaying
the huge potential power of the working class, clearly frightened the
generals and the possessing classes across the region. Among other
things, the revolution has brought a new spur of life into independent
working class activity, with the rebuilding of independent unions that
were once destroyed by al-Bashir’s regime. Workers had started showing
they would be a serious social force to reckon with, and that they could
threaten the whole edifice upon which the junta’s political and
economic power is erected.
Unfortunately, there was a lack of decisive leadership as to what to
do after the two days of general strike, which had left the power of the
generals hanging in the air. Immediately after the end of the general
strike, the military rulers mounted a counter-offensive, deciding to
strike at the revolution’s most iconic and vibrant expression. The
leaders of the TMC stated that the sit-in had become a threat to “the
security of the country” and had to stop. Pro-regime media went into a
frenzy to denounce the peaceful sit-in as a nest of drug smugglers,
debauchery and petty banditry, in an attempt to justify its dispersal
and the subsequent massacre.
The old regime remnants and their international backers meticulously
planned their operation. The offices of Al Jazeera in Khartoum were shut
down on May 31, and its journalists banned from reporting from
Sudan. To restrict further coverage, Internet was then shut down
nationwide on Monday – and has not been restored since. Regular army
units were consigned to their barracks and many of them were stripped of
their weapons so that they could not obstruct the dirty job carried out
by the RSF mercenaries. Scenes were later reported of soldiers sobbing
helplessly as the carnage was unfolding.
This contrasts with the crocodile tears shed by Western governments,
which cannot make up for their staggering hypocrisy. The EU has pumped
millions into the RSF over the years to curb migration from Sudan to
Europe. The White House and many European governments have propped up
and supplied the Saudi regime with the weapons that have been used to
gun down protesters and other innocent civilians in Sudan’s streets.
No more negotiations with the bloodthirsty generals
The political lessons of what happened need to be fully drawn, to
make sure that the blood of the martyrs of June 3 and of the subsequent
days has not been spilled in vain. Before this episode occurred, the CWI
and its supporters in Sudan had been consistently arguing against the
illusion of concluding a compromise with the old regime generals, who
had grabbed power by force for the very sake of cutting the
revolutionary flood in its track.
A statement by Socialist Alternative Sudan on May 23 explained: “Why
should a revolution that got rid of Al Bashir through the sweat, tears
and blood of our people end up negotiating a power-sharing arrangement
with part of the oppressive apparatus that protected and benefited from
his rule for so long? There is no way the military rulers have any
intention to relinquish power, and they will not leave the scene unless
they are compelled to do so by the force of mass revolutionary action –
the only language they understand”.
Back in early April, the first reaction from the streets to the
announcement of the creation of the TMC was the slogan: “The revolution
has just started”, showing that many people were not prepared either to
fall into the trap laid by the perpetrators of the military coup.
Unfortunately, this was not so much the case for the leaders speaking on
their behalf, organised in the Forces for the Declaration of Freedom
and Change (FDFC), who accepted to negotiate with Al Bashir’s generals.
The FDFC is a broad opposition alliance whose spinning column is the
Sudanese Professional Association (SPA, a network of professional unions
which commands important authority among workers and grassroots
activists for its organising role in the movement) but which also
includes right-wing opposition parties embedded with the bourgeois
Sudanese elite, like the National Umma Party and the Sudanese Congress
Party.
These latter parties have a long legacy of making opening moves and
concessions to Al-Bashir’s regime; they never trusted the mass movement,
but wanted to ride it in order to access lucrative political careers in
a future capitalist administration. Showing their true colours, the
Umma Party leaders openly rejected the call for last week’s general
strike. Now they have come out in support of the latest political
manoeuvre of the TMC, the announcement of elections within nine months.
Elections held under the current conditions, with the military and
security clique in control, would yet obviously be nothing but an
authoritarian masquerade.
By trying to pragmatically ensure the unity of the opposition under
the leadership of the FDFC, the SPA leaders have mistakenly tied their
hands to a dead-end strategy, trying to reconcile the demands of the
revolutionary movement with the cynical ambitions of the
counter-revolutionary military rulers. All SPA supporters should demand
that the SPA now breaks ranks with all those pro-capitalist forces and
leaders who would show any more readiness to strike a deal with the
military butchers on the back of the revolutionary movement.
The FDFC negotiators thought they could appease the corrupt and
brutal junta and convince them to adopt a more “reasonable” stand by
sharing power in a hybrid sovereign body, composed of military and
civilian representatives. Several weeks were wasted in fruitless
back-and-forth negotiations with the TMC, throwing confusion in the
movement and angering many activists. As many protesters were clearly
aware, the generals sat at the negotiating table not for the sake of
generously giving up their power, but in order to win time, fool the
opposition with vague promises and wait for the right opportunity to
resort to violence against the masses on the streets.
On Wednesday General Burhan made a televised speech in which he said
the TMC was willing to resume negotiations. This call was made as its
henchmen were firing, beating and killing in the streets, and hours
before security forces arrested a prominent politician of the
opposition, Yasir Arman, leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation
Movement North (SPLMN). The FDFC spokesmen have, rightly, stated that
they would stop all political contact with the Military Council, and
suspended the negotiations as they consider “the junta no longer
eligible to negotiate with the Sudanese people”. But it never was
before! From the very beginning, while under tremendous pressure from
the mass movement, the TMC was nothing but the nerve centre of the
counter-revolution, composed of notorious corrupt war criminals and old
regime supporters, who sought to hijack a revolution that represented a
direct threat to their brutal rule and their exploitative system. From
their point of view, the removal of Al-Bashir and other top officials
happened only to try and preserve the essential foundations of the old
state machine and safeguard their own positions, out of which they
derive important privileges and economic wealth.
Heroic resistance
Despite the extent of the regime’s violence, protesters driven out of
the site on Monday outside the defence ministry displayed a heroic
resistance, continuing to demonstrate, erecting barricades in the
streets of Khartoum and the neighbouring city of Omdurman. In
neighbourhoods throughout the capital, people poured onto the streets to
protest the junta’s actions, barricading streets with bricks, burning
tires, blocking bridges. On Tuesday, videos appeared on social media
showing residents even performing Eid al-Fitr prayers behind their
barricades.
According to a CWI supporter living in Khartoum, protesters
barricaded most roads in the city as of Wednesday June 5, although some
have since been removed by force. Fierce street battles regularly oppose
angry youth to RSF patrols roaming around and terrorising people;
gunfire continues to be heard and more killings are taking place. On
Tuesday evening, security forces tried to break up Port Sudan’s sit-in
in front of the 101st infantry division without being able to do so,
while Port Sudan workers have continued acts of strikes and civil
disobedience. Protestors closed most of the main roads and a number of
neighbourhoods using roadblocks and tire fires.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, angry marches, mass
demonstrations and road blockades also erupted in various parts of the
country as the extent of the massacres in Khartoum became clear. On
Wednesday, mass demonstrations broke out in Zalingei in Central Darfur,
El Geneina in West Darfur, and Nyala in South Darfur, braving tear gas
and live bullets and chanting slogans demanding the fall of the military
junta.
Sections of the working class have downed tools in protest to the
military junta’s actions, as did the oil field workers in West Kordofan.
On Monday, internal and external flights had stopped at Khartoum
International Airport coinciding with the announcement by the Sudanese
Pilots Association of an all-out civil disobedience without any
exception to any flights. In reaction, regime militias have been forcing
striking workers to work under threats on their lives. Airport workers
who were on strike were visited at their home addresses and forced to go
to work at gunpoint. One man who refused was shot in front of his
family.
The threat of such brutal counter-revolution needs to be answered
with mass, organised collective action and self-defence by the
revolutionary masses. As militias are spreading terror, rape and
slaughter, the organization of the physical defence of the revolution
has become a life-or-death question. Defence committees should be set up
in all workplaces, communities, and neighbourhoods, and link up with
each other to coordinate their action, and centralise any weapon they
can find, including makeshift ones.
The class divisions within the armed forces and the revolutionary
sympathies that still prevail among many ordinary soldiers should also
be acted upon without delay. After all, the looming mutiny in the lower
ranks of the army was one of the key reasons behind the junta’s rush to
get rid of Omar Al Bashir. Public calls should be made by the SPA and
the revolutionary committees towards the rank-and-file soldiers and
junior officers to refuse any orders coming from the military council,
rebel against their commanders, democratically elect their own
committees, and link up with the revolutionary people to help them hunt
down and disarm all the militias, and arrest and try all the killers,
rapists and torturers.
The calls by the SPA for a “complete civil disobedience; the closing
of all main streets, bridges and ports; and an open political strike at
all places of work and facilities, in the public and private sectors”
are going in the right direction. Whereas the calls for this
“comprehensive strike” have been made for starting on Sunday, there are
signs of it developing already – although with the Eid holidays, it is
difficult to evaluate the extent of this. In any case, the masses do not
have the luxury to wait. Immediate and decisive action is required to
defeat the counter-revolution’s current rampage. Barricades on the
streets, strike actions with workers’ defence groups protecting the
workplaces, occupations of strategic locations and infrastructure, are
the way to go to paralyse the current offensive from the reactionary
junta, its militias and security forces, and begin a decided
revolutionary counter-offensive.
Down with the TMC – Power to the workers and the revolutionary people!
In the course of the revolutionary struggle, a far-reaching process
of grassroots organization took shape in the communities and in the
workplaces, in local areas and at the sit-in protests, in effect
developing a situation of “dual power”: challenging the old state
machine run by the generals and old regime remnants, appeared the
embryos of a new society, in the form of various local revolutionary
committees. With these local committees as a foundation unit, a new
revolutionary state power could be built, that could give the challenge
to the military clique in the TMC and its various appendages.
Neighbourhood, strike and workplace committees, if generalised, could
elect representatives to local, regional and nationwide councils, and
vie for political power in the name of the revolution.
For such a struggle to mobilise the widest energies and support, it
has to harness on its banner not only demands for a real democracy in
Sudan; but also demands addressing the burning social and economic
questions that are continuously subjecting the masses to daily
suffering: the struggle for bread, jobs, decent wages, housing, land,
access to education and healthcare, transport and social provisions. If
argued consistently, such a program could even contribute to break the
ranks amongst some of the most downtrodden and under-class youth being
enrolled in the regime’s militias and currently weaponised to repress
the movement.
Yet eventually these demands can only be fulfilled if the key sectors
of the economy are taken off the hands of the corrupt military elite
and of the domestic and foreign capitalist class, who are siphoning them
for their own enrichment. As The Economist commented on April 27, “The
junta has much to lose. An estimated 65%-70% of state spending goes on
security, compared with just 5% for public health and education.
Families connected to the military and security services run the
businesses that dominate the Sudanese economy.” These businesses should
be brought under public ownership, to be democratically planned and
managed by the workers and the revolutionary masses.
A government of working people and poor farmers, implementing
socialist policies, would put an end to the pillaging of the economy and
the ocean of misery it brings along, and disarm the counter-revolution
both politically and militarily. Appealing to the workers, poor and
oppressed people of Africa and the Middle East to join the fight against
capitalism and dictatorship, such a government would be a huge source
of inspiration to the millions of people internationally watching with
anxiety the unfolding battle between revolution and counter-revolution
in Sudan.
As it is, the future of the Sudanese revolution is very uncertain.
The political vacuum inherited from the absence of a mass party, that
could unite the workers and the revolutionary people behind a clear
program and show a decisive way forward, weighs heavily on the movement.
Reports of tensions and clashes between the Sudan Armed Forces and the
RSF indicate that the situation could get very messy, with elements of a
civil war taking shape or even the possibility of a “coup within the
coup”, or of more serious clashes between various armed factions and
militias vying for control. However, the revolutionary movement has not
pronounced its last words, and it is the duty of all socialists, trade
unionists and left activists around the world to assist this struggle in
any way they can to drive it to a successful outcome.
Our demands
-Immediate mobilization to the defence of the Sudanese revolution –
for an all out, countrywide general strike against the coup council
-For the mass and democratically organised self-defence of the
revolution. Build strike action and protection committees in all
workplaces, streets and neighbourhoods. Disband and disarm the Rapid
Support Forces and all the regime’s militias.
-Defend all democratic rights, release all political prisoners and people arrested in the last days.
-Bring down the military regime, arrest the TMC leaders – for a worker’s and poor’s government based on people’s committees.
-For the Sudanese people’s right to determine their own future – no to
the meddling and intervention in Sudan’s affairs by international and
regional powers.
-Scrap the military and security budgets – for a program of massive
public investment in infrastructure, health, jobs and education
-Nationalisation under workers’ control of all the companies and assets
belonging to old regime cronies, military and security officials
-International workers’ solidarity with the Sudanese revolution – no
trust in the African Union, the European Union and other imperialist
bodies and governments
-Down with capitalism, exploitation and war. Return all Sudanese troops from Yemen immediately.
-For a free, democratic and socialist Sudan, recognising the right of
self-determination for all oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups
By Serge Jordan, Committee for a Workers’ International (the
international socialist organisation the Socialist Party in Ireland is
affiliated to)
tw warning for mentions of sexual assualt, extreme violence and more.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) confronted a CEO Thursday for pricing a drug designed to reduce the risk of HIV transmission at $8 in Australia but over $1,500 in the U.S.
“You’re the CEO of Gilead. Is it true that Gilead made $3 billion in profits from Truvada in 2018?” Ocasio-Cortez asked Gilead CEO Daniel O'Day.
“$3 billion in revenue,” he clarified.
The current list price is $2,000 a month in the United States, correct?“ she asked, referring to Truvada.
“It’s $1,780 in the United States,” O'Day responded.
“Why is it $8 in Australia?” Ocasio-Cortez countered.
“Truvada still has patent protection in the United States and in the rest of the world it is generic,” O'Day explained, adding, “It will be generically available in the United States as of September 2020.”
“I think it’s important here that we notice that we the public, we the people, developed this drug. We paid for this drug, we lead and developed all the patents to create Prep and then that patent has been privatized despite the fact that the patent is owned by the public, who refused to enforce it,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“There’s no reason this should be $2,000 a month. People are dying because of it and there’s no enforceable reason for it.”
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
