Riot police arrested two senior members of south Sudan’s main political party and their supporters who tried to demonstrate outside Sudan’s Parliament on Monday despite an official ban, a witness and officials said.
Yasir Arman, a senior member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), scuffled with police outside the National Assembly in Khartoum and was driven away to a police station, where other demonstrators gathered, a Reuters witness said.
Officials said Pagan Amum, the SPLM’s Secretary General, had also been arrested.
The SPLM is junior partner in the national coalition government following a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war between Sudan’s north and south.
Police beat protesters and onlookers outside Parliament with batons as Arman was driven away chanting ”freedom”. Hundreds more SPLM and opposition supporters gathered in the area after the arrests and were surrounded by police.
Some protesters congregated outside the opposition Umma party headquarters, where police fired tear gas to disperse them.
Other areas of Khartoum were unusually quiet on Monday after state authorities announced a last-minute public holiday which they said was to encourage people to take part in the last day of registration before elections.
The SPLM and opposition parties had called the rally outside Parliament to demand democratic reforms in a rare challenge to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Sudanese authorities announced on Sunday that the rally was banned.
Senior SPLM member Anne Itto told Reuters that the party’s leadership was meeting on Monday to discuss the arrests.
”We are surprised and disappointed that [after Sudan’s 2005 north-south peace deal] people can be denied the right to express themselves,” she said.
Ibrahim Ghandour, a senior official in the northern-based National Congress Party, said the Interior Ministry declared the protest illegal because the organisers had failed to apply for permission to hold the event.
”The National Congress Party is not against democratic action including protests and rallies,” he said.
An official in the opposition Umma party had said on Sunday the ban showed the National Congress Party (NCP), the senior coalition partner, was not serious about letting dissenting voices take part in elections, scheduled for April 2010.
The oil-producing country is to hold its first multi-party polls in 24 years under the 2005 peace deal that created the SPLM-NCP coalition government.
Relations between the former foes have stayed tense and both have accused each other of failing to implement the deal, which guarantees the south a referendum on independence in 2011.
Two million people were killed and four million fled their homes between 1983 and 2005 as Sudan’s north and south battled over differences of ideology, ethnicity and religion.
North Sudan is mostly Muslim while southerners are largely Christian and followers of traditional beliefs. — Reuters