KHARTOUM (AFP) – Sudanese anti-coup activists called for mass protests on Sunday, as medics said the number of people killed since last month’s military takeover had risen to at least 40.
The African Union has condemned the deadly crackdown on protesters and called on Sudan’s leaders to refrain from the “excessive use of force.”
Sudan’s top general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on October 25 declared a state of emergency, ousted the government and detained the civilian leadership.
The military takeover upended a two-year transition to civilian rule, drew wide international condemnation and punitive measures, as well as provoking people to take to the streets.
The Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) has urged protesters to keep up their campaign.
On Saturday, pro-democracy activists made online calls for mass anti-coup protests with a “million-strong march on November 21”.
The SPA is an umbrella of unions which were instrumental in the months-long demonstrations that led to the ousting of president Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.
Protests on Wednesday provoked the deadliest day so far, with the toll of those killed now standing at 16 after a teenager who was shot in the head died, medics said.
“One martyr passed away... after he succumbed to severe wounds after being hit by live rounds to the head and the leg on November 17,” the independent Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors said. He was aged 16, it added.
Most of those killed on Wednesday were in North Khartoum, which lies across the Nile river from the capital, medics said.
Police officials deny using any live ammunition and insist they have used “minimum force” to disperse the protests. They have recorded only one death, among demonstrators in North Khartoum.
The African Union, which suspended Sudan after the coup, also condemned “in the strongest terms” Wednesday’s violence, in a statement released Saturday.
AU Commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat called on Sudan’s authorities “to restore constitutional order and the democratic transition” in line with a 2019 power-sharing deal between the military and the now-deposed civilian figures.
Sudan has a long history of military coups, enjoying only rare interludes of democratic rule since independence in 1956.
Burhan, the top general, insists the military’s move “was not a coup” but a step “to rectify the transition” as factional infighting and splits deepened between civilians and the military under the now-deposed government.