KHARTOUM: Sudan’s ruling party expelled three leading reformers yesterday, in the party’s most serious split in years, as President Omar Hassan Al Bashir hinted at an imminent and wide-ranging government shake-up.
The National Congress Party’s shura council agreed to oust ex-presidential adviser Ghazi Salahuddin Atabani, former sports minister Hassan Osman Riziq, and Fadlallah Ahmed Abdallah, NCP deputy chairman Nafie Ali Nafie told reporters.
An internal NCP investigation had already recommended that the trio be ousted.
They were among more than 30 prominent NCP reformers who issued a memorandum to Bashir saying the government’s response to September fuel price demonstrations betrayed its Islamic foundations.
Critics of Bashir’s 24-year regime have become increasingly vocal since the government slashed fuel price subsidies, leading to the worst urban unrest of his rule.
Security forces are believed to have killed more than 200 demonstrators, Amnesty International said, but the government has given a toll of less than half that.
Nafie said the expulsions would take effect in 10 days unless the trio returned to the ruling party.
The reformers violated party rules by setting up a new political organisation, officials said, but Atabani has accused the NCP of spending too much time on “this minor internal issue at a time when the country is on the verge of collapse”.
Several others who signed the memorandum to Bashir have been suspended from NCP activities for one year.
The Atabani group announced in late October that they would form a new political party, although they have not yet revealed details of their movement.
“We will soon make changes in the executive and legislative bodies at the federal and state levels,” Bashir told the shura council.
“Reforms have to come from within party institutions,” he said, although analysts have been sceptical of the NCP’s willingness to consider divergent opinions.
The 400-member council is the NCP’s second-highest decision-making group, outside the general congress, to be held next year.
AFP
