General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (R), Sudan’s deputy head of the Transitional Military Council, and protest leader Ahmed Rabie shake hands after signing the constitutional declaration at a ceremony on August 4,2019./Getty Images
A senior state Department official in the United States said Friday that the US no longer has an adversarial relationship with the Sudanese government and is working with its counterparts on the possibility of removing it from a list of state sponsors of terrorism.
However Tibor Nagy, assistant secretary for African affairs, cautioned that doing so was a process with conditions.
“It’s not an event, it’s not flipping a light switch. It’s a process and we are heavily, continuously engaged with our Sudanese interlocutors on how we can go about doing that,” he told reporters in a briefing.
Asked if the United States was committing to lifting sanctions, Nagy said “No” but added: “There are conditions to such an event."
Everybody is hoping that it will happen, everybody is hoping that it happens as quickly as possible, we all understand the hardships that it is causing, he said.
The U.S. government added Sudan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1993 over allegations that then-President Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist government was supporting terrorist groups.
The designation makes Sudan technically ineligible for debt relief and financing from the IMF and World Bank. Congress needs to approve a removal.
Bashir was toppled by the military in April from power after months of demonstrations over price hikes for fuel and bread and cash shortages.