An Autopsy of an Internet Revolution That Devoured Its Own Children

By Moatasim Agraa

There is little doubt that the December–April uprising carried the hopes of its participants—young and old alike—for a better Sudan, broader rights, and greater dignity. (Here, I use the word “revolution” in the sense of an uprising.)

Yet another undeniable and bitter truth is that conditions deteriorated after the fall of Omar al-Bashir’s regime—even before the outbreak of war—particularly at the economic level. The situation reached a farcical point with the formation of a “Higher Economic Committee” led by Hemedti, whose educational qualifications are hardly known, alongside Dr. Mariam al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, whose knowledge of economics may well fall short of my own understanding of urological surgery—about which I know nothing beyond a vague “uh…whoop.”

The stark reality is that after the fall of Bashir’s regime, the country descended into a brutal war that consumed everything in its path, displaced millions, and impoverished nearly everyone. Because this war cannot be separated from the way public affairs were managed after Bashir’s removal, merely celebrating the virtues of the revolution and calling for its return amounts to a startling denial of the gravest tragedy in Sudan’s history. Such an approach is unacceptable—particularly since these calls are almost entirely devoid of any attempt to analyze or identify the structural flaws that led the revolution to such a catastrophic outcome. Without such analysis, no meaningful vision is offered for avoiding the defects that drove both the revolution and the country toward ruin.

None of this diminishes the legitimacy or the grandeur of the revolution, nor does it constitute a call for submission to corrupt authoritarian rule—even for a single day. The point is that political forces and public opinion leaders have a duty to acknowledge reality: the revolution ended in catastrophe. The task now is to identify the shortcomings that produced this reality and confront their roots, so that the next revolution does not meet the same fate. Those who fail to understand their history are condemned to repeat its tragedies—from the failure of the October Revolution to the failure of the first April uprising, and now to this present debacle.

A logical starting point in this autopsy is the slogan “Just fall, that’s all.” It encapsulates the root of the tragedy, because it assumed that the sole problem was Bashir’s regime and that its mere collapse would automatically bring at least a relative improvement in conditions. As a mobilizing chant for street protests, the slogan was entirely understandable—rallying cries do not lend themselves to theoretical complexity.

The problem, however, was that the same mentality—“Just fall, that’s all”—came to dominate the discourse of political parties and intellectuals as well. They failed to produce any credible vision, program, practices, or institutions capable of managing public affairs more effectively. Consequently, political discourse remained confined to condemning the Islamists (“the Kizan”), blaming every difficulty on their thirty years in power or on their alleged conspiracies afterward. At one point, even a communal Ramadan iftar organized by a small group of Islamists was portrayed as an existential threat to the revolution. It never occurred to them that a revolution whose survival could be threatened by such an event had already sunk to the level of a bad joke unworthy of existence.

This reductionist mentality—a kind of monomania fixated solely on the Islamists—contributed to deepening intellectual poverty and to an inability to perceive other objective challenges, as well as internal deficiencies within political parties suffering from severe intellectual anemia and often led by the least capable among their ranks.

What happened in Sudan is not unique. A similar fate befell all the uprisings of the Arab Spring, which were followed by worse conditions—even in places where the state did not collapse or descend into war. The common factor across these experiences is that they all unfolded within the same geopolitical environment and were thus subject to the influence of the same external actors.

Another shared feature is that these uprisings took place in the age of the internet. The most important arenas for mobilization, slogan-making, and the construction of collective imagery were online spaces—for example, the now-famous “sovereignty-over-coexistence” chant circulating digitally. This environment did not allow genuine leadership to emerge organically from the streets through face-to-face engagement with the protesters—leaders who would be of the people, with the people, and accountable to them.

The final outcome was a wave of energized youth capable of toppling dictatorships but lacking the readiness and institutional capacity to run the state or secure a smooth transition. As a result, the fall of authoritarianism was not followed by the emergence of a credible governing alternative. Instead, a power vacuum emerged—one that was filled by opportunists, some of whom now openly stand among the ranks of the Janjaweed, who have been accused of some of the worst crimes recognized in international and moral law. Others entered into a quiet, informal alliance with these same forces. Meanwhile, the purists scattered: some chose neutrality, some pinned their hopes on the Janjaweed to create a “useful revolutionary balance of weakness,” and a small minority confronted them openly, whether by word or by action.

The lesson that must be absorbed is that “Just fall, that’s all,” even if useful as a rallying slogan, is not enough to replace an unjust regime. Toppling authoritarianism without articulating a credible alternative risks creating a power vacuum whose consequences may prove disastrous for the people.

This does not mean resigning oneself to tyranny. Rather, it is a call for all living political forces to rise to the level of the challenge and build parties and institutions capable of managing public affairs responsibly and competently after a transfer of power. Calling for the return of the revolution while evading the duty to analyze the reasons behind its catastrophic derailment—and how to prevent it in the future—is simply a call for another blind act of collective self-destruction.

Accepting oppressive rule is not an option for free people. But leaping blindly into darkness is an intellectual and moral folly that cannot be justified. Likewise, fleeing from difficult questions and contenting oneself with childish romanticism about the beauty of the revolution is not revolutionary at all—it is simply an admission of failure.