Sudan’s NUP launches its “million signature” campaign for regime change
July 6, 2013, (KHARTOUM) – The Sudanese opposition National Umma Party (NUP) will launch its “memorandum for liberation” campaign on Sunday which aims at collecting peoples’ signature to change the government, officials here said today.
The NUP member of information office in Khartoum state, Ayoub Mohamed Abbas, said that the party’s leader, al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, will be the first person to sign the memorandum.
He added that the memorandum is not only confined to NUP members, but all Sudanese people, pointing that all political parties from opposition and government were invited to attend the launch of the campaign.
The NUP official said that the signing of the memorandum will begin in Khartoum and will proceed to cover all states.
In the same context, the NUP leading figure, Abd Al-Jalil al-Basha, said that the move comes in fulfillment of the NUP’s message to the government which was delivered by Al-Mahdi who urged the government to approve the comprehensive political solution or face the sit-ins and public campaigns.
Meanwhile, the NUP secretary general in Khartoum state, Abdul Rahman Saleh, called upon NUP members and its religious wing “ Kayan Al-Ansar” to attend the launching of the campaign.
Late last week, the NUP organized a mass rally in Sudan’s twin capital of Omdurman in which it called for establishing a new regime in the country in a rare show of force.
In his address to the rally, the NUP leader accused the government of bad policies that split the country into two, allowed for international intervention, breeding extremist Islamic factions, mismanagement of money during the oil boom that neglected crucial productive sectors and destroyed civil service.
“The regime that seized power through a coup and established empowerment through exclusion and making people poor, abusing human rights, tore the country and subjected it to internationalization so it deserves to be asked to leave; Leave!”, he said.
“We are working to establish a new system that frees the country from tyranny and corruption and achieve complete democratic transformation, comprehensive and just peace and our means to achieve this is through mobilization and sit-ins and all the available methods except violence and utilizing the outside [foreign forces]”, Al-Mahdi added.
However many opposition figures and even some within the party assert that al-Mahdi has no genuine interest in seeing the regime go.
They also point out that al-Mahdi’s son Abdel-Rahman is an assistant to president Omer Hassan al-Bashir.
(ST)