Tyres burned in new Sudan protests over prices

Protesters hurled stones, burned tyres and blocked roads in the Sudanese capital on Saturday, the eighth day of unrest sparked by rising prices, AFP reporters said. However, the demonstrations were not as widespread as on Friday when they engulfed Khartoum and cities across the country. In the potholed Khartoum district of Al Deim, the scene of some of the largest unrest on Friday, burning tyres, rubbish, and stones formed roadblocks and an AFP reporter saw one youth dragging a large piece of metal to create a barricade. Blue-uniformed riot police lined a main road through the area which smelled of tear gas as stones thrown by protesters rained down. Demonstrators gathered in groups of 30 to 40, scattering from plain clothes officers who descended on the neighbourhood's dirt alleys. The people are "fed up," said a taxi driver coping with a government-imposed fuel price increase of about 50 percent which took effect this week. In a southern district of the city, tear gas was also been fired and tyres burned by demonstrators, while protests later erupted in two other parts of Khartoum where demonstrators called for "freedom" and denounced high food prices, an AFP reporter said. Police and plain-clothed state intelligence agents have adopted a zero-tolerance policy, using tear gas, batons and whips against protesters. The Sudanese Media Centre (SMC), which is close to the security apparatus, on Saturday reported that police have been given an order for "immediate suppression of the demonstrations and rioters, under the law." Two witnesses in the eastern city of Gedaref said that about 200 people gathered in the main market where they denounced the high cost of food before police dispersed them with batons. "We will not be governed by a dictatorship!" they shouted, the witnesses said. Poverty is endemic in Gedaref and the two other eastern states of Kassala and Red Sea. The unrest continued after demonstrations throughout the capital and in key towns around the country on Friday, in the most serious expression of discontent since student-led protests began on June 16 outside the University of Khartoum. London-based watchdog Amnesty International said "scores of activists" have been arrested over the past several days. The demonstrations symbolise "mass rejection of the regime's oppressive policies and its failure in governing this country," Sudan Change Now, an activist youth movement, said. Inflation has risen each month, hitting 30.4 percent in May, before Finance Minister Ali Mahmud al-Rasul on Wednesday announced the scrapping of fuel subsidies, causing an immediate jump in the price of petrol. Bankrupt Sudan has lost billions of dollars in oil receipts since South Sudan gained independence last July leaving the north struggling for revenue, plagued by inflation, and with a severe shortage of dollars to pay for imports. The country's poverty rate is 46.5 percent, the United Nations says. "The government must immediately retract the austerity measures it has adopted which reflect the distortion in its expenditure which continues to prioritise defence and security at the expense of social services," Sudan Change Now said. The current regime of President Omar al-Bashir, an army officer who seized power in 1989, withstood earlier student-led protests by thousands of people objecting to high prices in 1994. Sudan's latest demonstrations remain small compared with the mass uprising that swept neighbouring Egypt last year and toppled another long-time strongman, Hosni Mubarak.