Senegal remains under tension on Saturday in the aftermath of clashes which left six new dead, bringing to 15 the number of deaths since Thursday and the two-year prison sentence for opponent Ousmane Sonko. “On June 2, six deaths were recorded, four of them in the Dakar region and two in the Ziguinchor region,” the spokesman for the Minister of the Interior told AFP. Clashes opposed Friday evening small groups of very mobile young demonstrators to the police in Dakar, in the suburbs of the capital and in the south of the country. No incident had been reported by the Interior Ministry on Saturday afternoon.
The clashes that erupted in the Dakar region have left 15 dead since Thursday
Photo credit: JOHN WESSELS / AFP
Many public and private properties were ransacked, including banks and Auchan stores in the suburbs of Dakar. Burned tires and stones littered the roadway of several streets on Saturday morning. Several social networks, such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter, are cut, a government measure to stop, according to him, “the dissemination of hateful and subversive messages”. The army deployed, as the day before, around strategic points. Police and gendarmes are also present in large numbers in the capital.
Ousmane Sonko cries conspiracy
The Senegalese hold their breath in fear of an arrest of the opponent Ousmane Sonko, declared presidential candidate of 2024, and sentenced Thursday to two years in prison for having pushed to “debauchery” a young woman under 21 years old. This decision makes him ineligible for the time being. Ousmane Sonko has been crying out from the start of the affair for a plot by President Macky Sall to eliminate him politically. He says he is “sequestered” in his Dakar residence by security forces who prevent anyone from approaching.
Ousmane Sonko can now be arrested “at any time”, said Justice Minister Ismaïla Madior Fall. His party, the Pastef, called “to amplify and intensify the resistance (…) until the departure of President Macky Sall”, of which he accuses the regime of “bloody and dictatorial excesses” Friday in a press release. For the government spokesman, the events since Thursday are not “a popular demonstration with political demands”, but rather “acts of vandalism and banditry”.
“We don’t know how it’s all going to end”
“We are facing thugs recruited to maintain an artificial tension. They will continue to carry out their work but time is on the side of total recovery and the maintenance of public order,” he told the newspaper. The Observer. “I’m really scared because we don’t know how it’s all going to end. But it was very predictable, and maybe we had to go through it for things to move, for politicians to stop make fun of the people,” Fatou Ba, a 46-year-old shopkeeper in the working-class district of Dalifort in Dakar, told AFP.
“If they want peace (the authorities), they won’t go looking for Sonko,” she hopes. “Nobody is safe in this country right now. If the protests continue, life will be even more difficult,” said Matar Thione, a 32-year-old motorcycle driver. In this district, the few service stations open are stormed for fear of a shortage of gasoline. Dakar, usually teeming, is emptied and many businesses are closed. On Friday, the international community, representatives of associations and football stars like star striker Sadio Mané called for restraint and an end to the violence in this country deemed to be a rare island of stability in West Africa.