THE last days of June witnessed an amazing demonstration of popular support for political change in Sudan. 

Millions responded to the call despite the savage killings at the beginning of June when over 100 people were massacred when regime paramilitaries overran the protest camp in central Khartoum and unleashed a reign of terror across the city’s urban neighbourhoods. 

In towns, cities and villages across Sudan protesters marched, demanding an end to the existing regime and real change. They were backed by strike action led by the Sudanese Professionals Association which paralysed transport, factories and services.

Before then the Transitional Military Council believed it could maintain the existing regime with changed personnel. The demonstrations showed them that they could not. The message was that the uprising continues. The people of Sudan support the Freedom and Change Coalition.

The Freedom and Change Coalition is rooted in the popular will for fundamental social change. It has a broad base and encompasses a spectrum of political parties. 

However, its real mass support is among the people — in the thousands of Resistance Committees that now exist in every urban neighbourhood and every village across Sudan and in the Sudanese Professionals Association, the name for the coalition of informal (and previously illegal) trade unions that are replacing the regime-controlled organisations. 

The Sudanese Professionals Association represents teachers, engineers, dockers, farmers, doctors, rail workers. All these occupations previously, 30 years ago, had free trade unions. 

After 1989 these unions saw their assets seized, their officers arrested and their members dismissed. Today the regime-controlled trade unions are vertical organisations including, and ultimately run by, the controllers of enterprises. Sudan’s previous foreign minister was the head of the country’s official “trade union federation.”

This new movement is the product of 30 years of repression — and 30 years of underground resistance. It is marked by two special characteristics: the leading role of women and the mass presence of youth.

The leading role of women should be no surprise. Historically women played a key role in Sudanese politics and the Kandaka, or Nubian Queens, is today the name given to female Sudanese protesters linking them to this past. 

During the liberation struggle against colonial rule in the 1940s and ’50s women played a leading role and the first female MP to be elected in the Arab world was a Communist, elected in Sudan in 1965. 

But women have particular reasons for wanting rid of the Islamist regime that has been imposed since 1989. 

It has robbed them of any legal rights and left them to the mercy of sharia courts where they are not entitled to a lawyer, where marriage can take place as young as 10 and where public order laws prescribe strict codes for dress and where women are allowed to move.

Worse, however, has been impact of the regime on everyday life. War has been constant since 1989 — in Darfur in the west, in the south and in the mountains in the east. 

Millions have been displaced internally. Of these over two-thirds are women and children who are often subject to forced labour.

In terms of family life it is women who have had to cope continuing escalation of costs of food, fuel and transport and the privatisation of education. In employment women have borne the brunt of the regime’s “dismissal from work for the public interest” — which enables the sacking of anyone considered to be in opposition.

It is for this reason that women predominate among the many millions who have emigrated and why in demonstrations in London it is women who are most visible.

The presence of youth is more surprising. This was a generation brought up under a strict Islamist regime and who have known no other. Yet the participation of youth is massive — and they have good reason for it.

The regime conscripts soldiers both for its internal wars and also to be used as mercenaries to fight for the Saudis in Yemen. Education is both privatised and empty of any content and life is culturally impoverished through censorship.

Unemployment, even for qualified youth, is very high. Young people also see the lives of friends destroyed by drugs imported by the regime to raise finance. Young people want life and they are determined to get it.

These are the forces that now confront the regime. Up until June the objective of the regime, and that of its international allies, was a “soft landing.” 

Leaders would be changed. The regime would continue. This was the perspective of its allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt, and also of its international backers, the troika of the US, the EU and Britain. 

Now in July a different future is possible, one of radical change, carried forward by the mass organisation of the Sudanese people.

Intense negotiations are continuing. The coalition is determined to secure a real change of regime. The army and its external backers are still trying to maintain their hold.

The coalition knows that an agreement will only have any reality if it is sustained by mass mobilisation and if it is accompanied by the dismantling of what is described as the “deep state,” the continuing structure of repression that sustains the existing regime. 

The regime’s power is enforced by a paramilitary security apparatus that penetrates into every locality. Its vigilantes are those who administer the Islamist structures of patronage and control. 

Its overlords are those who run the parallel militia, the Rapid Support Force, previously the Janjaweed militia, around General Hemeti.

This “deep state” is sustained by a raft of still largely secret agreements covering the possession of land, control of trade, the military, security and migration. 

All of this must be exposed and dismantled — and the process must be started by the trial of those responsible for the massacres on June 3 and subsequent days. A full public trial will finally reveal to the world the nature of our country’s apparatus of repression. 

It is for these reasons, because the work of liberating the Sudanese people has only just begun, that Sudanese workers look for solidarity from British trade unionists and all progressive organisations. 

It is hoped that a representative of the Sudanese Professionals Association will be visiting Britain later this summer and that trade unionists can hear at first hand the progress being made in developing democratic institutions that represent working people. 

Or, if this is not happening, join with their fellow workers in Sudan in demanding the end of repression and the liberation of women, young people and all those looking for a new life of freedom — and change.

Amal Jabralla Sidahmed is a doctor and a member of the central committee of the Sudanese Communist Party.