Sudan’s Transitional Military Council (TMC) reportedly resumed talks with opposition and protest leaders on Sunday to finalize a civilian-led transition to democracy.
“The new round of negotiations between the Transitional Military Council and the Alliance for Freedom and Change (ALC), began in the evening,” the ruling council stated in a statement released on Sunday evening, reported Africa News.
The military council had suspended the talks with the protest leaders on Wednesday following two outbreaks of violence around protest sites in the capital Khartoum. The two sides have held several rounds of talks since the military ousted President Omar al Bashir last month and since then a large number of Sudanese have continued to camp outside army headquarters in the Sudanese capital to demand the transfer of power to a civilian administration.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the chief of Sudan’s ruling military council, on Thursday announced the suspension of negotiation talks amid a deteriorating security situation in the capital, Khartoum.
He demanded the removal of the barricades installed by demonstrators in Khartoum and added that the TMC wants a suitable atmosphere is created to complete an agreement with the opposition alliance. But the alliance group maintained the sit-in protests outside the Defence Ministry and across the country. On Friday, demonstrators dismantled several of these barricades.
Notably, before talks were suspended, the ruling council and protest alliance had agreed on several key issues, including a three-year transition period and the creation of a 300-member parliament, with two-thirds of legislators to come from the protesters’ umbrella group.
But they are still divided over the composition of the transitional authority. Both want a majority of seats on the 11-member sovereign council, which will be the highest decision-making body in the transition period.
In related news, the military council claims that it had arrested the suspects in the killings of at least five pro-democracy protesters in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. At least four people died and several got injured during protests last week.
