Introducing a new blog by Carol Dudek: In the fall of 2019, we cheered on the great outpouring of mass protest which brought down the 30-year president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. The determined, outraged, participation of women was especially decisive in forcing his resignation.
But last October, the military staged a coup to remove the interim government which succeeded al-Bashir. An intense 5-month battle has ensued in the streets, with people coming back time after time even though the military has killed many hundreds.
This military coup was one of four last year in Africa; it’s well known that such coups do not happen without imperialist encouragement. The fact that the U.S. proclaimed its support for “democracy” is a pattern; U.S. loyal ally Israel supported the coup, likely representing the U.S. government’s actual approval of the violent coup.
We have been privileged to work with Carol Dudek as a World Can’t Wait volunteer for more than a decade. In the early 1970’s, Carol spent years in Southeast Asia supporting GI resisters to the U.S. war on Vietnam. She worked for decades assisting progressive lawyers in working for justice for the Attica Brothers and later for men unjustly imprisoned during the U.S. war on terror. Through getting to know a Sudanese man imprisoned in the U.S. as a victim of the “war on terror,” she became interested in Sudan and has followed the repression there following the military coup last year.
Carol follows news reports closely, and you will find much of interest in these reports she updates: Sudan blog.