Sudan: Radio Free Sudan

SUDAN

Radio Free Sudan

Capital FM is going silent in Khartoum.

The pop music radio station was part of a cultural revolution in Sudan this spring.

“It was just so beautiful, and we were just so proud that we’re soulful,” Ahmad Hikmat, the station’s content director, toldNational Public Radio. “You’d wake up in the morning, and you’d hear a song on Capital Radio was D’Angelo. Who would play D’Angelo in the morning, you know? It’s just 91.6 FM that would do that.”

In April, the Sudanese military took control of the conservative Islamic country after ousting President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The leader had a record of infamy, overseeing a murderous campaign in Darfur in western Sudan. Still, as Foreign Policy explained, leaders of the junta who succeeded al-Bashir were not exactly nice guys. They were among the so-called Janjaweed who perpetrated the horrors in Darfur.

With Bashir gone, calls for civilian leadership grew into a full-blown political movement. The military began cracking down on the protests in early June, killing scores of people, wrote Al Jazeera.

“Sudan can be better,” Nahid Gabralla, a 53-year-old activist who said security forces beat her and threatened to rape her in the June 3 raid on the main protest camp, told Reuters. “My daughter deserves to live in a nice country. … We will fight for a democratic Sudan, real change and for our rights.”

Recently, the military and civilian leaders signed a deal for sharing power until elections, promising an end to a standoff that had paralyzed the country.

The power-sharing deal creates a council of generals and civilians that will serve for around three years, reported Voice of America. The civilians will select a cabinet of technocrats. Officials will investigate the deadly June 3 crackdown, but the head of the military council, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, insists he and other leaders were not involved in the first violent incidents.

Some Sudanese might disagree. Many began uploading videos of harsh security tactics and police brutality as soon as the military junta ended an Internet blackout associated with the crackdown, reported Britain’s Channel 4 News.

Regardless, some expressed hope that Sudan can move forward. Others cautioned that the military won’t give up power – it has been a trend for military dictatorships to follow protests across Africa and Asia, and it is not unusual in Sudan either.

“The military may have wanted to calm the situation following weeks of deadly protests from the oppositions groups,” Nazlin Umar, a political analyst based in Kenya, told the Washington Times. “When the time comes, the military will obviously ignore the peace agreement and refuse to hand over power to civilian rule. That has been the history of the country since independence.”

The crisis took a toll on Capital FM. One staffer died in the military crackdown. More recently, government censors have been periodically taking the station off the air. Employees are leaving, fearing Sudan’s conservative Islamist culture is reasserting itself after the chaos of Bashir’s exit.

Regardless, the tunes linger. Hikmat said he can’t get Marvin Gaye’s “Make Me Wanna Holler” out of his mind.