بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
News & Comment
US-backed Sudan Regime Tries to Continue without Omar al-Bashir
News
According to a New York Times article co-authored by their Cairo bureau chief, the former Guardian journalist Declan Walsh, headlined Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir Is Ousted, but Not His Regime:
As Sudan’s military announced at lunchtime on Thursday that it had finally unseated President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a brief burst of joy exploded outside the military headquarters in Khartoum where huge throngs of protesters had massed.
Nearly four months of protest, dozens of deaths at the hands of the security forces and endless chants of “revolution!” had finally come to this: the ouster of the despised leader who had ruled their vast country, plagued by famine and war, for 30 years. But the euphoria quickly soured when the protesters realized who had replaced Mr. al-Bashir.
The somber man reading the speech on television was Lt. Gen. Awad Mohamed Ahmed Ibn Auf, the defense minister and a confidant of Mr. al-Bashir. General Ibn Auf, like Mr. al-Bashir, had been accused of perpetrating war crimes in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.
The protesters fell silent as he laid out his terms: the release of political prisoners, but also a two-year transition steered by a military council, the suspension of Sudan’s Constitution, the dissolution of government and curfews starting at 10 p.m. that night. Loud groans and lamentations rippled through the crowd, followed by a current of anger.
New cries rang out. “We do not replace a thief with a thief,” some chanted.
“We don’t want the same guy!” shouted others. Within hours, another taunt at the regime was circulating online: “It fell once, it can fall again!”
Comment
In the end, Omar al-Bashir was unable to survive this latest crisis in his 30 year rule over Sudan, falling just 9 days after Algeria’s ruler of 20 years, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was forced to resign following mass protests in his country. But, in both cases, their regimes persist. In Algeria, a close associate of Bouteflika, the speaker of its parliament’s upper house, Abdelkader Bensalah, was appointed interim president; in Sudan, the defence minister Ibn Auf, is known to be close to Omar al-Bashir. America, the actual backer of the Sudanese regime, tacitly approved the change in Sudan as is evident from the carefully worded statement of US State Department spokesman Robert Palladino in which he said that the US calls “on transitional authorities to exercise restraint and to allow space for civilian participation within the government.”
Despite achieving ‘independence’ from colonial rule many decades back, Muslim lands in fact continue to be governed by the systems of rule that the colonialists left behind, presided over by an agent ruling class beholden to the West both politically and ideologically. As the Islamic revival within the Muslim Ummah thrusts forwards, these rulers have increasingly masked their traitorous pro-West polices with pseudo-Islamic rhetoric and fake sharia rules. Omar al-Bashir was an old master of the art, a staunch American agent who had camouflaged his 1989 military coup with an Islamic façade but there are many others like him today – the Sultan of Brunei using his Sharia-like punishments as a cover for continued covert British control of Brunei with its vast oil wealth and strategically located military base, or Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan using his ‘Taliban Khan’ image to sell out the jihad in Afghanistan to the Americans in exchange for IMF loans and conditionalities that will only further overburden the sinking Pakistani economy. Still, as political awareness in the Ummah builds up, it is becoming increasingly difficult for such agents to continue to fool their peoples about their commitment to Islam. In both Algeria and Sudan mass protests continue, as those protestors see clearly that nothing really has changed, both regimes are simply trying to continue as before.
Real political awareness means not only understanding political realities but also applying one’s particular viewpoint in life to these realities. As Muslims, real political awareness means not only knowing that our rulers are Western agents but also realising that the root of our problems is the political system that the colonialists left behind in our countries through which they continue to exploit us for their own benefit. The Muslim Ummah will never be truly liberated from Western colonialism until we throw out these systems along with the agent rulers that safeguard them. Such will be the case when, with Allah’s permission, we re-establish the righteous Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet (saw).
Allah (swt) says in the Qur’an:
(أَلَمْ تَرَ إِلَى الَّذِينَ يَزْعُمُونَ أَنَّهُمْ آمَنُواْ بِمَا أُنزِلَ إِلَيْكَ وَمَا أُنزِلَ مِن قَبْلِكَ يُرِيدُونَ أَن يَتَحَاكَمُواْ إِلَى الطَّاغُوتِ وَقَدْ أُمِرُواْ أَن يَكْفُرُواْ بِهِ وَيُرِيدُ الشَّيْطَانُ أَن يُضِلَّهُمْ ضَلاَلاً بَعِيدًا)
“Have you not seen those who claim to have believed in what was revealed to you, [O Muhammad], and what was revealed before you? They wish to refer legislation to Taghut, while they were commanded to reject it; and Satan wishes to lead them far astray.” [an-Nisa 60]
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Faiq Najah