CAIRO: Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Sudan’s capital and across the country on Sunday, demanding the disbanding of the former ruling party that underpinned Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir’s three decades in power.
The demonstrations were organized by local groups linked with the Sudanese Professionals’ Association, which spearheaded the uprising that toppled Al-Bashir in April. Protests continued throughout the summer, despite a violent clampdown by the country’s security forces, forcing the ruling generals into a power-sharing agreement with civilians.
In the capital of Khartoum, the protesters also called on authorities to step up an investigation into the hundreds of people who went missing on June 3, when security forces dispersed the main sit-in outside the military headquarters. According to the protesters, at least 128 people were killed and hundreds went missing. Authorities put the death toll at 87, including 17 inside the sit-in area.
Dura Gambo, an activist with the SPA, said the demonstrators wanted to know the fate of those who disappeared in the June crackdown.
“If they are alive, where are they, and if they were dead, where are their bodies? This what we want to know,” she said.
The protesters carried posters of the missing people, and marched to the office of the country’s chief prosecutor, where they presented officials with written demands for a new investigation by an independent committee.
Protesters already rejected the results of the prosecutor’s investigation in September, which said the country’s ruling generals did not order the deadly break-up, and blamed the deaths on paramilitary forces who exceeded their orders.
Setting up an independent probe into the crackdown was a key point in the transition deal between the military and civilian leaders signed in August. The new government has just over three years to steer the country toward democratic elections.
Sunday’s rallies also took at aim at the lingering influence of Al-Bashir’s political system, including his National Congress party.
Footage circulated online showing the protesters, mostly youth, in the city of Wad Madani, the provincial capital of Al-Jazirah province, waving Sudanese flags and calling for the former ruling party’s dissolution as well as resignation of the local governor whom Al-Bashir appointed.
There were no reports of any clashes with police or casualties during the protests.
The transitional government previously said it won’t appoint governors or an interim parliament until it makes peace with the country’s rebel groups.
The first round of peace talks between government and the rebel leaders took place in October in South Sudan’s capital, and are to resume later this month.

BEIRUT: Shelling by Turkey-backed opposition fighters killed a Burmese medic and wounded another Iraqi member of the humanitarian team on Sunday in northeastern Syria where fighting between Kurdish fighters and Turkey-backed gunmen continued, the head of the humanitarian group said.
David Eubank, a former member of US Army Special Forces and the founder of the Free Burma Rangers said in a video that the attack occurred about 4 kilometers from the northern town of Tal Tamr. Eubank said the medic, Zau Seng, was hit in the head by shrapnel from a mortar shell that struck nearby as he was filming a video of the fighting.
“He died right away and we brought him here to Tal Tamr,” Eubank said in the video, which also showed one of the aid group’s armored vehicles hit by shrapnel.

Eubank added that an Iraqi team member was also wounded in the mortar attack, which he blamed on the “Free Syrian Army and Turks.”
Earlier in the day, Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, tweeted that he “received terrible news” of the death of a medic with the Free Burma Rangers, putting the blame on the Turkish army.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, also reported the death of the medic.
Turkey’s defense ministry denied that Turkish troops attacked the aid convoy, saying that the reports “are not true.”
The Free Burma Rangers identifies itself as a multi-ethnic humanitarian group working in Burma, Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan.
Turkey last month invaded northeastern Syria to push out Syrian Kurdish fighters, who it considers terrorists for their links to a Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey.
The Observatory said the fighting Sunday was concentrated near the town of Zirkan in the northeastern province of Hassakeh, adding that a Turkish drone attacked positions of the Kurdish-led forces in the area.
The Kurdish Hawar news agency said Turkish troops pounded Zirkan with artillery shells amid fierce fighting. It added that Turkey-backed fighters are trying to cut the M4 highway that links the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, with Hassekeh, adding that the Syrian Kurdish fighters repelled the attacks.
The fighting continued two days after Turkey and Russia launched joint patrols in northeastern Syria, under a deal that halted a Turkish offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters who were forced to withdraw from the border area following Ankara’s incursion.
Though the truce has mostly held, it has been marred by accusations of violations from both sides and occasional clashes. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to resume the offensive if deemed necessary.

AMMAN: An agreement was reached to end a strike in Jordan by employees of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, hours after the walkout began Sunday, Amman’s top diplomat and a trade union leader said.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi announced the deal with UNRWA employees, involving salary rises of between 70 and 100 Jordanian dinars (88 to 126 euros) per month from January, at a late afternoon news conference with union representatives.
“Consequently, it has been decided to put an end to the strike,” said Riyadh Zyghan, leader of the UNRWA employees’ union in Jordan.
More than two million Palestinians are registered in Jordan as refugees with UNRWA, which provides everything from healthcare to schooling.
Around 7,000 workers had joined the strike, forcing a shutdown of agency facilities, according to UNRWA spokesman in Jordan Sami Mshamsha.
Mshamsha said the union demanded a salary increase of 200 Jordanian dinars, but agreed to ask for half that amount following negotiations with UNRWA.
The union of UNRWA workers had said the action would be “open-ended” and had told pupils and students they should stay at home.
The strike came as the agency faces an unprecedented financial crisis.
In 2018, the United States suspended and later cut all its funding for UNRWA, causing a shortfall that threatened to close its schools and hospitals.
Those woes were compounded by allegations of abuse by the agency’s management, leading other key donors — the Netherlands and Switzerland — to snap shut their purses.
In June UNRWA commissioner general Pierre Krahenbuhl told a news conference in Amman that the agency faced an expected $211 million shortfall in funding for 2019, and called on donors to fill the gap.
The agency runs 169 schools in the kingdom, serving some 120,000 students, as well as a faculty of science and educational arts, 25 primary healthcare centres and other services.
UNRWA was set up in 1949 after more than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the war surrounding Israel’s creation the previous year.
It provides vital schooling and medical services to some five million Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including annexed east Jerusalem.

CAIRO: Looking to offer a transport service that sets it apart from its rivals such as Uber, Careem and Swvl, the Egyptian company Halan has launched a new app that offers its customers with travel by tuk tuk.
The number of Halan application users in Egypt is close to 7.5 million, due to the fact that there are huge numbers of tuk-tuks crisscrossing various parts of Egypt.
Naglaa Samy, head of the Motorcyclists and Tuk-Tuk Union in Egypt, said there were 3 million tuk-tuks in Egypt but only 99,000 were licensed to practice the profession, according to figures published by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in March.
Mounir Nakhla, executive director of Halan, said there were investors “who contributed in creating the application, in addition to a marketing campaign we launched at the beginning. All these factors contributed in the success and wide use of the application in Egypt,” Nakhla said.
Nakhla said that a 7-km trip costs around 13.5 Egyptian pounds ($0.8) and takes roughly 20 minutes on a motorcycle, while it costs 20 Egyptian pounds in a taxi which takes an hour for the same distance. The trip has become more expensive with the increase in fuel prices but the increase is smaller than that charged by other transportation applications.
Nakhla is the founding partner of Mashaweery, Egypt’s biggest light-weight transportation company which has more than 100 branches across the country and 40,000 active clients. The company finances most of the country’s application motorcycles and tuk-tuks. Nakhla also founded Tasaheel, a macro- financing company with more than 100 branches and 350,000 customers in Egypt.
Halan’s biggest challenge is to respond to increasing demand and to beat out the major players in the Egyptian market, Uber and Careem.
Tuk-tuks in Egypt are not permitted in the center of major cities but Col. Emad Hamed, an officer in the Public Traffic Department, told Arab News that tuk tuks in the country had become a reality because they are used “in a massive and random manner.”
They also have become one of the main factors behind the increase in robberies, rape and harassment. As a consequence, Hamed said it was necessary to legalize this mode of transport in villages and areas where vehicle access is difficult to reach while preventing the scooters from working in the cities. He said that the Traffic Department objected to the use of tuk-tuks in big cities because they were deemed unsafe and lacked safety and security precautions.
However, tuk-tuks have imposed themselves on society. Hamed noted that legalizing this form of transportation would decrease crimes since it would be easy to find violators. As for the Halan application Hamed said that it would monitor all tuk-tuk drivers, an important step toward the legalization process. “I want a law that says all application drivers must have licenses to practice the profession so that the process would not become haphazard.”

Ahmed Hussein, a tuk-tuk driver listed in the application in the Cairo suburb of Maadi, an upscale part of the city, said the application made it easier for him to reach his customers and that it was also a safe method for him. However, Hussein added that not everybody used the application — “not more than one client in four daily,” Hussein said.
He said that providing tuk-tuks with license plates would reduce crimes such as burglary, harassment and bullying since some tuk-tuk drivers commit such crimes safe in the belief that it is difficult to trace them. That, he said, gives other tuk-tuk drivers a bad reputation.
Arab News talked to some middle-class users in Egypt. Dalia, from Maadi, said that she uses the app because it is a safe method for her as she knows the driver’s name and the number of his license plate. However, Dalia’s mother said she doesn’t use the app because she doesn’t have a smart phone.

BEIRUT: Protesters in Lebanon are planning mass demonstrations on Sunday in Riad Al-Solh and Martyrs’ Square in the heart of Beirut to further their demands for political reform in the country. Zeina Al-Helou, a public affairs analyst, told Arab News that “the call to bring down the government has been met, but there are other demands we want to achieve.”
Protesters are now focused on forming a government from outside the ruling political groups, she said.
“We did not topple Saad Hariri personally, but we toppled a government that includes Hezbollah, the Free Patriotic Movement and other political components, because their political practice over the years brought us to the situation we are in,” she added.
Protests across the country eased on Saturday, the 17th day of unrest.
Meanwhile, supporters of the Amal Movement staged a counter-protest near the home of Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri following a rumor on social media that protesters would rally there on Saturday to call for his resignation. Al-Helou said that although the social media rumor was false, “protesters’ enthusiasm has not cooled.”
“We are counting on people to join the central rally on Sunday. The protests are continuing,” she said.
“Protesters are in one valley and the political forces in power are in another,” she said.
Al-Helou said that the Lebanese authorities “are all betting on procrastination and negotiating their shares. They do not know that the people have something else in mind.
“It is not our goal to bring in a government that follows the same approach and style. This is not what is required. People are more aware than the authorities and their demand is a salvation government with specific powers to reform the judiciary, adopt an electoral law, hold early elections and set laws to prevent collapse.  It is not enough to have a technocrat government; it must understand and feel the people’s pain.
“We will spare no effort to use the street as a means of pressure,” she added. Lebanon’s presidency has yet to issue a schedule of parliamentary consultations to appoint a replacement for Hariri, who resigned four days ago.

The protesters are in one valley and the political forces in power are in another.

Zeina Al-Helou, Lebanese expert

The Presidential Press Office said on Saturday that President Michel Aoun has been making the necessary contacts, “but the current situation in the country requires a calm handling.”
“Expediting consultations in such cases can have harmful repercussions,” the presidency said.
Meanwhile, a leading figure in the Future Movement, Mustafa Alloush, said that communication “is no longer possible between Prime Minister Hariri and the head of the Free Patriotic Movement, Gibran Bassil, and the past experience between the two men made the coexistence between them intolerable after the dictates became boundless.”
“Bassil is a person who wants everything in the state. Coexistence with him is impossible,” Alloush said.
“The sovereign government demanded by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is a government that maintains the same balance of the outgoing government, and Hezbollah refuses to change the current structure,” Alloush said.
“The structure of the current system is no longer useful today and the opposition must be a real force of pressure. We refuse to be in a government ruled by Gibran Bassil.”
Supporters of the Free Patriotic Movement are due to hold a protest near the presidential palace on Sunday.