Category: BREAKING NEWS

When will the Sudanese ruling junta and civilian groups establish a civilian-led transitional government?

The signatories of the deal set to organize a gradual transfer of power to civilians known as Framework agreement, have missed a deadline to advance towards a return to democracy.

According to a timeline set up by the parties, a new prime minister and institutions of the transitional authority should have been announced on Tuesday (Apr. 11).

The deadline lapsed after the parties twice failed to sign a final transition deal over disagreements on the integration of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) into the army.

The point of contention between the two forces concerns the “command and control” of the committee tasked with overseeing the reorganization, Yassir Arman, a member of an umbrella group of pro-democracy factions wrote on Twitter Wednesday (Apr. 5). Neither the army nor the RSF responded to The Associated Press’ request for comment.

Divisions between Sudan’s deputy leader – who is the RSF commander- and the military chief and de facto head of Sudan, raises fears of confrontations between the army and the RSF.

In recent weeks, both forces have amassed troops and weapons in and around Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. The army has greatly ramped up its presence in the city center, parking armored vehicles at nearly all junctions leading to the country’s presidential palace.

Beyond the generals, other challenges remain.

The Framework agreement signed last December has been contested on the streets. Political players, from former rebel leaders to grassroots pro-democracy networks, remain opposed to the deal despite brokered efforts to draw them in.

Sudan has been plunged into chaos after a military coup, in October 2021 removed a government.

Tunisian police used tear gas on Tuesday to disperse about 100 African asylum seekers and migrants who had been camping outside the headquarters of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in the capital, Tunis for some 25 days.

In an open letter, the group from 15 sub-Saharan countries said they had “taken refuge” near the building after being “chased out” of several Tunisian cities following a February speech by President Kais Saied slamming illegal immigration.

But local residents were not happy with their presence saying they were “blocking the passage” and that people could “no longer leave their homes”.

“This is a big problem because when they gather like this they feel stronger, they feel safe and they don’t fear the police,” said resident Elyes Ben Zakour.

“They don’t care about people or women, they don’t respect the elderly or the young They don’t care about anything. If you pass by here, they can hit you and tell you to leave,” he said.

Malian asylum seeker, Famoussa Koita, said he had received his status and had done his resettlement interview, but that others were increasingly frustrated over the long wait for their cases to be dealt with by the UN agency.

“There are others like me who have been here for more than two or three years and they have not been summoned. This is due to the application procedures,” he said.

Koita added that the UNHCR could not deal with all them and so it was up to the asylum seekers to “understand that there are a lot of applications and they can’t be processed all at the same time”.

On 3 April, the agency in Tunisia announced on its Facebook page that it had stopped “all registration and pre-registration activities from 31 March to 17 April due to a migration of the registration and identity system”.

This “temporary” suspension concerned “all UNHCR operations worldwide”.

An Africanewsguru.com reporter at the scene said that after the migrants were dispersed, they saw that surveillance cameras and windows at the UN building had been smashed.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Tunisian Interior Ministry, Faker Bouzghaya, told Africanewsguru.com that the police had intervened “at the request of the UNHCR” and that 80 migrants had been arrested, 30 of whom were taken into custody.

The German ambassador to Chad, declared persona non grata for “discourteous behaviour”, left the country on Saturday evening, Chadian Foreign Minister Mahamat Saleh Annadif told Africanewsguru.com on Sunday.

On Friday, the government of Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno had asked the diplomat to leave the country within 48 hours, for “non-compliance with diplomatic practices”.

“The German ambassador to Chad, Jan Christian Gordon Kricke, took the Air France flight on Saturday evening,” Annadif told Africanewsguru. The information was confirmed to Africanewsguru.com by Aziz Mahamat Saleh, the government spokesman.

The authorities did not officially specify the exact reasons for the expulsion.

But a Chadian government official told Africanewsguru.com anonymously that N’Djamena blamed the diplomat for “interfering too much” in the “governance of the country”, as well as “remarks tending to divide the Chadians”.

On Friday, an official of the German Foreign Ministry had considered “absolutely not understandable” the reasons for the expulsion of its ambassador, in post since July 2021.