Sudan: Opposition bloc withdraws from road map

KHARTOUM

Sudan’s largest opposition bloc decided Wednesday to withdraw from a road map agreement signed with the government in 2016, deeming it non-binding.

The decision by Nidaa al-Sudan, or Sudan’s Call, was part of the closing statement of a three-day meeting of its leaders in Paris.

The bloc, which includes rebel groups as well as a number of political parties, also announced that all of the armed movements will halt negotiations with the government.

According to its concluding statement, the meeting included discussion of the expansion of "the revolutionary movement", the diversification of its tools and its expansion in an organized way through committees in cities, villages and neighborhoods to “resist the regime’s schemes to suppress it and its escalation until reaching the decisive action that brings the regime down”.

In August 2016, the bloc’s leaders signed a road map agreement in Addis Ababa which had already been signed by the Sudanese government in March of the same year.

The bloc’s meeting is the first of its kind to be held abroad since its leader and the leader of the National Umma Party, Sadiq al-Mahdi, returned to Sudan on Dec.19.

The bloc includes the armed movements the Sudan Liberation Movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement. It also includes several political parties, most prominent of which are the National Umma Party and the Sudanese Congress Party.

Sudan has been rocked by popular protests for the last two months with demonstrators decrying President Omar al-Bashir’s seeming failure to remedy the country’s chronic economic woes.

A nation of 40 million, Sudan has struggled to recover from the loss of some three quarters of its oil output -- its main source of foreign currency -- since the 2011 secession of South Sudan.