The bread revolt in Sudan began on 19 December 2018 in the city of Atbara, situated at the confluence of the river of the same name with the Nile. The city lies on the road linking the capital Khartoum (400 kilometers to the south-west) with Port Sudan (660 kms to the east), the country’s most important port facing onto the Red Sea. Atbara was the capital of the Sudanese railway industry and boasts a long tradition of workers’ strikes, which prompted the formation of trade unions and political groupings of not inconsiderable size. Among these was the Sudanese Communist Party, of Stalinist orientation, which over the course of the country’s history had a certain political weight and which in Atbara had its main stronghold.

In recent years, with the Sudanese government focused mainly on road transportation, the railway industry entered a slow decline to the extent that production has now declined to a level that is little more than symbolic.

The seeds of the revolt, that has been going on for over twenty days now and was still underway when we went to press, were sown by the government back in 2017, when they announced the ending of subsidies on the price of bread, their objective being to reduce a budget deficit which was in danger of reaching 5% of GDP.

Just a year ago protests against it had persuaded the government to go into reverse gear, and reintroduce a part of the subsidy. But subsequently the exacerbation of the economic crisis, due in part to the secession of Southern Sudan, that has taken along with it 75% of the oil reserves, caused a reduction in the GDP of 2.3%, causing the weight of the deficit to rise again in relation to the national revenue. The measure adopted by the government was to print paper money causing inflation to reach 69% last November, currently the second highest in the world after Venezuela.

To this was added a shortage of bread, fuel, and basic medicines, which affected Khartoum particularly badly.

The difficulties that Sudanese proletarians were experiencing trying to earn a living finally triggered a revolt that immediately spread from Atbara to Port Said and Nhoud.

On December 20 in Atbara the demonstrators attacked and set ablaze the headquarters of the governing National Congress Party, expression of the religious right of the Sunni Islamist orientation led by the current president Omar al-Bashir, who has been in power since 1989 after mounting a coup d’etat. Following the attack in December, which was immediately imitated in other cities, a state of emergency was declared and the army was deployed. But these measures failed to stop the protests which instead spread to several other cities, including the capital Khartoum, despite ferocious repression. According to official figures the number of protestors killed was 24, according to other sources at least 50, while estimates of the number of arrests runs into the thousands, although the government will only admit to 800. Some victims were also to be counted among the police forces.

On the 17 December, by which date the movement had evidently extended quite considerably, more blood was spilled. Manifestations and protests were being held in all of country’s main cities whereas in Khartoum a procession tried to march on the presidential palace. The police opened fire causing three more deaths. Violent incidents then also occurred at the funerals of the victims. As we go to press the movement has not abated and undoubtedly still has further surprises in store.

The wave of protests, following the adhesion of groups from the opposition, is increasingly taking on more political aims, in particular forcing Omar al-Bashir to resign. The revolt has also given rise to an ‘Intifada Committee’, composed of the main opposition groups, which has taken over the leadership of the struggle. Evidently, if bread cannot be guaranteed to the proletariat, the primary concern of the bourgeoisie is to divert the struggle to objectives that are not class ones and to prepare a changing of the guard within the nation’s leadership.

The social crisis in Sudan has moved on from December of last year, when the country’s worsening economic situation hit the proletariat and the middle classes in the form of considerable rises in the price of essential goods.

Among the factors that contributed to the exacerbation of the crisis, in a country where 50% of the population live in extreme poverty, there is also the enduring effects of the secession of the southern part of the country, which happened in 2011, and beneath which lies most of the mineral wealth.

Also during the war, with the aim of countering the separatism of the animist and Christian peoples in the Darfur region, which in its turn is traditionally supported by the United States and Israel, the pro-government Janjaweed militias were deployed, under the leadership of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, who according to Le Monde is ‘Sudan’s new Strong man’.

In 2013, once the war was over and these new militias had found their way back to the North of Sudan, they were incorporated into the Rapid Support Force (RSF), whose terrorism was used to try and stop a movement which had upset the country’s old political equilibrium and which already, in the previous April, had brought about the removal from power of President Omar al-Bashir, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also in good relations with Russia and China.

The reutilisation of war veterans is an inevitable toxic by-product of all bourgeois wars, and it is no accident that they are often found carrying out a repressive role in the various episodes of social turbulence that are a natural consequence of military conflicts.

Such would occur in the Sudanese capital where last year on 3 June the paramilitaries of the RSF assaulted demonstrators who for some months had been protesting outside the army headquarters, killing 116 of them and wounding 650 others.

The situation remains fluid and the protest movement is still active, hegemonised by the middle classes, gathered around the Association of Sudanese professionals. The country’s social and institutional crisis has not been raised to that of a political crisis which, evidently, is also due to the lack of a revolutionary party.

There are many reasons for believing that the military faction which will eventually exercise the greatest control in the complex Sudanese scenario will be Hemedti’s.

Over the course of recent years, the government has assigned a primary role to the RSF militias, both as mercenary troops employed in various war zones such as Central Africa and Yemen, and to perform police duties in the management and repression of migrations from the Horn of Africa. According to Le Monde, over the last few years the European powers have made Sudan one of the linchpins of their migratory policy. Among the principal activities assigned to the militias is that of killing smugglers [passeurs], and being stationed on the frontier with Ethiopia to prevent migrants getting in, as well as on the borders of Libya to stop them before they enter the country that constitutes the final stage before arriving at the Mediterranean.

But some reports affirm that they, in their turn, have sometimes taken up people smuggling themselves. In short, statemen and military leaders have turned migration, and the ignoble persecution of migrants, into a lucrative profession. ‘The world is a village’, says an old adage: Hemedti is an example from an African country where the instrumentation of migrations for political ends resembles that of many European countries, and above all Italy’s.

Once again we see how hypocritical and demagogic are the claims of bourgeois politicians to be ‘helping Africans in their own home’: yes, sure, ‘helping’ them in places where the great powers bankroll mercenary militias to extort money from them, kill them, and enslave them.