Dissens · Lukas Ondreka

Dezemberrevolution im Sudan

·1 hr 24 min·6 clips

Activist Marwan Osman describes how 5,200 Sudanese resistance committees made decisions through debate until consensus, avoiding power concentration.

1. Dissens podcast host Sina presents a narrative episode on Sudan's December Revolution of 2018-2019, recorded during Black History Month, drawing on interviews with researcher Miriam and archival audio from activist Marwan Osman. 2. Sina is joined in discussion by co-host Gona, who provides reactions and contextualizing questions throughout the episode. 3. The central argument is that the current Sudanese civil war — one of the deadliest conflicts in the world — cannot be understood without understanding the 2018-2019 revolution, because many argue it is a counter-revolution against the democratic civilian population. 4. Sina provides a geographic overview of Sudan: located in northeast Africa, bordered by Egypt, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, with access to the Red Sea and proximity to the Arabian Peninsula, making it a historically important trade and resource hub. 5. Sudan became independent from Britain in 1956, bringing together over 500 ethnic groups in a single state structure that concentrated power and wealth in Khartoum and the Nile region, creating marginalization patterns that persisted. 6. Omar al-Bashir came to power through a military coup in 1989, establishing an Islamist and neoliberal regime that privatized health and land, dispossessed smallholder farmers, and committed massacres in peripheral regions. 7. In Darfur from approximately 2003, al-Bashir's regime built the Janjaweed paramilitaries — initially mounted forces with Arab nationalist ideology — to conduct massacres against the civilian population, a campaign many describe as genocide. 8. The European Union knowingly cooperated with the Rapid Support Forces, successors to the Janjaweed, from 2014 onward, providing infrastructure and knowledge for border enforcement — described by the host as killing and torturing people attempting to reach Europe. 9. After South Sudan's independence in 2011 reduced oil revenue, al-Bashir implemented IMF austerity, cutting food subsidies in 2013 and deepening poverty, which triggered recurring protests that were quickly suppressed because trade unions had been banned. 10. In response to the suppression of unions, neighborhood committees formed from 2013, initially providing local services like cooking gas and health facilities, before gradually politicizing into resistance committees. 11. Marwan Osman describes the committees' structure: consensus-based decision-making with no voting, neighborhood autonomy protected through coordination bodies that had no decision-making authority, resulting in 5,200 resistance committees operating across Sudan by 2023. 12. The December Revolution began not in Khartoum but in Atbara, an industrial city with a long trade union history, in December 2018, when protests against rising bread prices quickly escalated into demands for the fall of the regime. 13. Women made up approximately 70% of the protesters despite al-Bashir's morality police, which could sanction women for appearing in public in trousers; female protesters developed the tactic of wearing traditional thob dress with full makeup over sportswear to pass as shoppers while moving toward protest sites. 14. Between December 2018 and April 2019, more than 800 protesters were placed before emergency courts and imprisoned as political prisoners, while security forces also killed demonstrators. 15. Protest tactics evolved in response to repression: decoy protests to draw security forces away from actual demonstrations, tire burnings at false locations, and protesters taking refuge in strangers' homes whose families claimed them as relatives when security forces arrived. 16. The April 2019 sit-in at the Khartoum military headquarters covered 108 hectares — calculated by the host as equivalent to over 150 Lützerath climate camp football fields — in the center of the capital. 17. The sit-in included medical tents, kitchens, concert stages for political discussion and music, and tents from regional groups including Darfur where people shared testimony about violence, making it a cross-regional solidarity and political education space. 18. On April 11, 2019, Omar al-Bashir was deposed by his own military after 30 years in power, but the military immediately formed a Transitional Military Council including the Rapid Support Forces, and protesters stayed in the sit-in demanding a civilian government. 19. The episode is structured as a narrative conversation between the host and a co-host who asks contextualizing questions, mixing prepared research with spontaneous reactions and audio clips from Marwan Osman's 2023 interview. 20. German-speaking listeners interested in revolutionary history, grassroots democratic organizing, and non-Western political movements will find this most engaging; those seeking current news coverage of the war rather than historical analysis will find it less directly useful.

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