General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan of Sudan and the leader of Ethiopia were pictured hugging at Khartoum’s Republican Palace on the Nile at the beginning of their talks, according to a picture provided by the ruling military-led Sovereign Council.
The two men’s meeting agendas, however, imply that the Ethiopian leader may be attempting to facilitate discussions between the ruling generals and civilian leaders in order to address Sudan’s protracted political crisis. The council did not specify what the two men wanted to talk about.
When General Al-Burhan overthrew the government in a coup he organised in October 2021, Sudan’s precarious democratic transition was halted and the nation was thrown into an economic and political crisis.
A tentative agreement on settling Sudan’s political crisis was struck last month between the generals and a significant pro-democracy coalition, the Forces for Freedom and Change, but it left numerous crucial issues unsolved for further negotiations, which started early this month.
The December agreement said that the military would leave politics and that a civilian prime minister would rule the nation for 24 months until elections.
During his journey to Khartoum, Abiy is expected to meet with the founders of the Forces for Freedom and Change as well as other political actors, according to officials.
Four months after longstanding leader Omar Al Bashir was toppled, Abiy oversaw an African Union mediation in 2019 that resulted in a military-civilian administration in August of that same year. General Al-Burhan’s coup in 2021 resulted in the overthrow of that interim administration.
Omar al-Bashir was elected president (with a five-year term) in the 1996 national election and Hassan al-Turabi was elected to a seat in the National Assembly where he served as speaker of the National Assembly “during the 1990s”.
He was reelected by popular vote for a five-year term in presidential elections held on December 13–23 2000.
Al-Bashir had achieved economic growth in Sudan. This was pushed further by the drilling and extraction of oil. However, economic growth has not been shared by all.
