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Women have always been at the forefront of Sudanese resistance

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

Protests against authoritarianism and military regimes are not new to Sudan. Even the revolution that overthrew Omar al-Bashir’s regime in 2019 was decades in the making.

Today, just over two years later, a military coup carried out on 25 October is threatening to roll back the gains of the 2019 revolution. What can we learn from the history of struggles against the previous regime in Sudan? And how are the groups that made the revolution possible two years ago, especially women’s groups, reacting to the coup?

Sudanese opposition against al-Bashir’s regime dates back to the first day of his rule in 1989. For 30 years, the regime met any dissent with brutal repression in efforts to prevent any organized resistance. It targeted trade and professional unions, and worked to weaken and divide political parties.

As a feminist who was part of the struggles against al-Bashir’s rule from the outset, I remember that women made their minds about the regime early on. It was their unity of purpose and experience from the long confrontation with the regime that helped prepare them to be among the most important factions that led the 2019 revolution.

If in 2019, women were already more organized and ready to topple the regime than many men, today, given the coup and the threat to the revolutionary gains in Sudan, we can say that the last two years of ‘transition’ have helped all revolutionary factions, including women’s groups, become more organized and able to network.

Leading the masses

The path towards the 2019 revolution was long. In order to understand it, we need to look back decades. In 2007, after the failure of the 2005 peace agreement between the al-Bashir regime and the South Sudan-based Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the Sudanese Communist Party began working to mobilize its allies in the National Consensus Forces, a coalition of political parties against the regime.

The Communist Party called for the formation of resistance committees in neighborhoods and, during its Fifth General Conference in January 2009, publicly called for the regime to be overthrown. The communists began building resistance groups, including feminist pressure groups, among the masses.

Women were prominent in the formation of various initiatives such as ‘No to Women’s Oppression’, a group formed days after a number of women, including journalist Lubna Ahmed Hussein, were arrested on 3 July 2009 for wearing trousers. ‘No to Women’s Oppression’ began with a meeting of solidarity in support of those women, some of whom were later convicted on charges of ‘indecent’ clothing, and against the dress code imposed on them by the al-Bashir regime.
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