The dispersal of the Khartoum sit-in: spatial dynamics of a massacre

In 2018 Sudan witnessed large-scale nonviolent mobilization which started long before in the neighbourhoods and finally resulted in the ousting of former president Omar al-Bashir in 2019 with protests continuing afterwards, opposing the ruling of the Transitional Military Council (TMC). While, geographically speaking, protests took place and faced repressive reactions all over the country, this paper focuses on a specific contentious event in the capital: After several months of marching in the streets of Khartoum, and upon the communication received by the Sudanese Professionals Association, protestors headed to the military headquarters in the center of Greater Khartoum. Known in Arabic as "al-qiyadah", the military headquarter was normally closed to the public. On April 6, 2019 protestors managed to reach the military headquarter and organized a sit-in, underscoring their ability to occupy a place representing state and military power. In a matter of days, they had set up their protest camp, appropriated and transformed the space to what some called the "liberated land of al-qiyadah". The occupation of the place lasted for 58 days, continuing even after the ousting of the president. Situated in a longer episode of contesting and negotiating power in the capital, the sit-in was violently raided on June 3rd, 2019 by the security forces of the TMC and is now remembered as the Khartoum massacre. Deploying Video Data Analysis the paper seeks to reconstruct the event of the Khartoum massacre and analyses its spatial dimension. Zooming in on the small scale of the military headquarter and limiting the temporal scope to the day of the massacre, allows to focus on the interplay of different actors in a spatially bound place, their interaction with the built environment, as well as the movement through that space in a moment where the contestation of power violently erupted. Furthermore, the triangulation of the video material with in-depth and expert interviews allows to embed the massacre and its consequences in the broader context of the sit-in and the Sudanese revolution.