Weekly Press Columns Digest
01 May, 2022
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - Three of the week’s issues that busied the public and, consequently, won wide press coverage and commentaries were:
- The criminal armed attacks on peaceful civilians in West Darfur’s Kreinik town and its neighborhoods
- The videos in circulation in which citizens take the law in their hands to punish robbers mounting motor bikes who used to loot the citizens in Khartoum
- The unjustified delay by the authorities to release leading figures of the high-level committee which investigated and took action on the corruption of the elements of the Bashir regime in what was seen as a way of scoring vendettas against these gentlemen.
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On the brutal attack on the kreinik area wrote Mr. Wa’il Mahjoub in the electronic publication Madameek (Brick Rows):
The abominable crimes that accompanied the armed attacks in the Kreinik area of West Darfur and, before that, the Mount Moon and other areas in West Darfur, have shown a leaning of the regular forces, the government militias and the armed movements to this tribe or that in the fighting.
This situation and these crimes may lead this globally isolated coup authority to be put under the UN Seventh Charter. And this may lead, at the end of the day, to the redeployment of UN forces in Darfur, because of the government failure to realize security in the region and due to the involvement of Government elements in communal fighting.
This UN intervention may also be justified by the use of heavy and banned weapons against civilians in what is classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity, both considered grave offences under the international law.
The Darfur crimes during the Bashir regime had turned this Darfur dossier into a permanent item on the UN and its Security Council agenda, leading to more and more sanctions against that regime, including an embargo on the import of armaments, an economic siege and the embargo on personnel involved in the fighting.
This had resulted in the formation of a UN peace force under the UN Seventh Charter that permits military intervention in member states where global peace is under threat.
The Darfur war crimes and the involvement of Bashir’s lieutenants in them had caused that dossier to be relegated to the International Criminal Court (ICC) when Bashir arrogantly refused to cooperate with the international community on the matter. So, legal cases were filed against Bashir himself and his men for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This coup clique of today, in its hectic search of power, has deliberately ignored the rules of military operations stipulated in the peace deals it concluded with the Darfur rebels that call for the assembly of troops, the collection of weapons and the determination of troops assembly positions outside the cities as initial steps for the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) of forces.
This situation has created a state of chaos that would never lead to anything other than we have seen inside cities in Darfur and elsewhere in the country of outbreaks of bloody conflicts, the spread of acts of looting, robberies and killing.
Involved in these acts were persons who drove vehicles, carried weapons and donned military IDs of this or that military group.
Those who would imagine that the assignment of the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission (UNITAMS) under Mr. Volker Perthes, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, and under the UN Sixth Chapter, has ended the UN sanctions and drove out the Seventh Chapter ghosts are wrong and should give it a second thought.
That is because UNITAMS did not annul the previous UN sanctions. In fact it would speed up the sanctions against the leaders and backers of the coup, military or civilian.
The beginning could be the actuation of the U.S law for the support of democratic transition in Sudan.
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On the cases when citizens took the law in their hands to punish bandits from the group of robbers knownTisa’a taweela literally means: The long nine, a term used in a game of cards played in Sudan. Another explanation of the term is that it likens the case when a robber twists his body in the shape of the number 9 before he moves away with what he has taken from his victim.
Wrote Mr. Abu Hureyra Abdelrahman in the Sudanile electronic newspaper:
Bloody images on display on Facebook and Whatsaap forums of robbers being punished by the public have become a daily routine.
In those images the gangsters are seen hailed with attacks from sticks and stones from all directions and manhandled severely.
Also tens of videos have documented persons robbed by tisa’a taweela gangs that have tended to swarm the city like grasshoppers.
In these robberies the citizens are threatened with knives, hacks and other weapons in open day light and in clear absence of the state authority.
The law criminalizes intervention by ordinary citizens to stop crime and take their rights with their own hands. Rights groups also condemn the enforcement of the law by unauthorized persons or groups. This job should be left for the police and the judiciary.
But, on the other hand, the citizens, due to inaction from the security and the legal authorities who have neglected their duties of stopping this lawlessness, are forced to defend themselves.
Incidences of such robberies are also blamed on the scarcity of security presence in the City’s outskirts.
The citizens involved in such acts of counter- violence are under a feeling of the absence of effective justice.
Many citizens have lost confidence in the police after they saw police and security elements openly seize phones and other properties of passersby after the end of the now frequent protesters’ marches. This has weakened and undermined the state authority.
This lax security has contributed to the proliferation of the tisa’a taweela phenomenon at this magnitude. The thieves no longer fear the police an jail is no longer a place that denies freedom to the thief. It has become a favorite place for the thief that he visits and quits as if nothing has happened. This is because the thief finds what he wants in this jail (on payment). He can find narcotics, films and can use telephones.
But encouraging these attacks on criminals will lead the society into an arms race in search of personal protection.
This is indeed a very grave matter, because violence always begets violence, especially in our country that stands on the crater of a political and social volcano.
The culture of assaults is intolerable in a modern state, in particular in the wake of the greatest peaceful revolution of the 20th Century that toppled the region’s most formidable dictatorship.
We have seen how the revolution has applied the law on the chiefs of the defunct regime who were accused of thefts, killings and mass murder that continued for three decades.
Those culprits were put before courts of law with complete legal representation and were accorded the best of civilized treatment that respected their human dignity while the people now treat petty thieves with kicking, killing and the insertion of hot pepper in their behinds or were tried to be burned alive.
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Reports have cited a procrastination on the part of the general attorney in the release of leading figures of the high-level committee that investigated and took action on the mismanagement and corruption of the defunct regime.
The men were first kept in jail for over two months. And due to public and foreign pressure the authorities presented them to investigation judges who decided them to be set free.
But all of a sudden the General Attorney said some of them were accused of financial crimes and cannot be released except on heavy bails it decided.
Reports have cited something fishy in the matter. The reports said an influential member of the Sovereignty Council was behind the move. The man is reported to have made a select of loyal attorneys to delay the release and effect the heavy bails.
On this affair wrote Mr. Bashir Arbaji in the daily journal Aljareeda (the Newspaper):
The authorities of the 25 October 2021 military coup have been detaining Mr. Wajdi Salih and Mr. Altayeb Osman Yousif on claimed charges of financial corruption.
With them were also arrested former member of the Sovereignty Council Mohammad Alfaki and former Cabinet Affairs Minister, Mr. Khalid Omar Yousif.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday saw a heavy legal battle whose heroes were the “emergency group of lawyers” that defends these detainees. The attorneys appointed by the evil coup procrastinated the release of the members of this anti-graft committee even after Judge Tayb Alasma’a ordered their release and refused to renew their detention for lack of evidence. But the emergency lawyers group at last emerged victorious and the men were released.
It became clear for everybody that the Attorney General is but a small fraction of the organs of the evil coup authority which receives orders from influential figures in the Sovereignty Council by the power of the gun , no more.
The attorney investigating the matter deliberately absented himself and closed his phone so that these honorable citizens could not be released. And even after contact was restored with him, he delayed their release. He in fact demanded the undertaking of very difficult bails for their release in a move unsupported by any law, any logic or any argument except the orders he received from above as a subordinate of the influential military group.
At the end of all this row created by the investigator and the military coup attorneys there was no way out other than to free these honorable men after the needles scandalous situation the government attorneys put themselves in.
By the elapse of this legal battle between the emergency lawyers and the general attorney there remains the most important battle of toppling this military coup and finishing with it altogether.
The need is now to topple this coup with all its security and legal institutions.
An end should be put for the domination of these liars of the military coup over the law and the government institutions.
That is the battle to be fought by all the forces of the glorious revolution of Sudan.
And if the members of this anti-graft committee have been declared innocent, there remains the release of the detained members of the resistance committees who now face a fierce attack from the repressive organs of the coup leader and his deputy.
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