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KHARTOUM — Thousands of Sudanese protesters on Monday marched against the October military coup which has led to scores of arrests, as authorities released some of those held, witnesses and lawyers said.

Regular protests calling for civilian rule have occurred throughout the impoverished northeast African country despite a deadly crackdown since the power grab led by army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan.

The coup, Sudan's latest, sparked wide international condemnation and cuts in aid.

At least 82 people have been killed, many of them shot dead, and hundreds wounded by security forces, according to medics. The latest fatality came on Sunday.

"The number of people detained has exceeded 200," according to a statement by a group of anti-coup lawyers, which confirmed that some had been ordered released.

Multiple political figures and pro-democracy activists are among those who have been detained.

Pro-democracy lawyer Enaam Attik said authorities have ordered that more than 40 people arrested in the crackdown on anti-coup protests be freed.

During Monday's demonstrations, protesters called on the military "to go back to the barracks" in the city of Wad Madani, south of Khartoum, witnesses said.

In the eastern state of Gedaref they chanted, "Civilian is the people's choice", according to witness Amal Hussein.

Demonstrators also marched to rally outside a government building in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan but security forces blocked their route with tear gas, according to witnesses.

In the eastern border state of Kassala, young protesters chanted, "No, no to military rule" as they headed towards a military base in the city, witness Hussein Idris said.

Security forces in the capital Khartoum fired tear gas at hundreds of protesters who tried to rally outside the presidential palace, where the ruling Sovereign Council is based along the Nile River, an AFP correspondent said.

The latest demonstrations came one day after United Nations human rights expert Adama Dieng arrived on his first official visit to Sudan.

Dieng is scheduled to meet with senior Sudanese government officials, diplomats, rights defenders and others.

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — Construction workers at a building site in northern Gaza have uncovered 31 Roman-era tombs dating from the first century AD, the Palestinian territory’s Islamist rulers Hamas said on Monday.

The tombs were discovered near the town of Beit Lahia as work began on an Egyptian-funded residential area, part of the $500 million reconstruction package Cairo pledged after the 11-day war in May between Israel and armed groups in the Gaza Strip.

Naji Sarhan, an official at Gaza’s ministry of public works, confirmed the find and said there is “evidence that there are other graves” at the site.

Construction work has been halted and technicians from Gaza’s ministry of antiquities and tourism have been sent to the site to catalogue gravestones and artefacts, officials said.

One technician, who requested anonymity, said the tombs were believed to be part of a cemetery linked to a nearby Roman site in Balakhiya.

The find was the latest in Gaza, where tourism to archaeological sites is limited due to an Israeli blockade imposed since Hamas took over the strip in 2007.

Israel and Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, tightly restrict the flow of people in and out of the impoverished strip, which is home to about 2.3 million Palestinians.

Last month, Hamas reopened the remains of a fifth-century Byzantine church following a years-long restoration effort backed by foreign donors.

PARIS — In the 60 years since Algeria won independence from France, it has gone through multiple crises with its former occupier, often fuelled by domestic politics.

Yet, the two sides had surprisingly good relations for the first four decades, and it was only in the 1990s that things started to fall apart, experts say.

“Generally, despite appearances and criticism, there has been a stable, very balanced relationship,” said Luis Martinez, a Maghreb researcher at Sciences Po university in Paris.

That is despite the devastation caused by the eight-year war of independence that finally led to the signing of the Evian accords on March 18, 1962, ending the conflict.

French historians say half a million civilians and combatants died — 400,000 of them Algerian — while the Algerian authorities insist 1.5 million were killed.

Under French Gen.Charles de Gaulle, whose administration signed the accords, and his successor Georges Pompidou, Paris had good relations with Algiers.

The same was true of the administration of Francois Mitterrand, even though he had been interior minister when Algeria’s armed independence struggle began in 1954 and remained opposed to the country’s independence.

“Mitterrand was surrounded by Socialist Party people, who were all pro-FLN,” said historian Pierre Vermeren, referring to the National Liberation Front, which led the revolt and has dominated Algerian politics ever since.

“[Mitterrand] was able to take a back seat” and let others deal with Algeria, said Vermeren, a professor at the Sorbonne University.

France was allowed to continue its nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara until 1967, and de Gaulle managed to negotiate a secret deal with the new Algerian state to allow for chemical weapons tests until 1978.

But in 1992, Paris raised hackles by criticising Algiers for suspending elections, in which Islamist parties had won the first round.

Algeria withdrew its ambassador in response.

The polls’ cancellation sparked another decade of devastating conflict in the North African country, until Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who rose to the presidency in 1999, offered an amnesty that paved the way for peace.

Despite being close to France, Bouteflika made use of anti-French discourse, primarily for domestic consumption, Vermeren said.

“To win back control of the ideological and political sphere after the civil war, [the Algerian leadership] ‘forgot’ that France had helped them fight the Islamists,” he said.

“They went back to their traditional enemy.”

‘Good ties in secret’ 

Under Bouteflika, Algerian leaders used ever-stronger language, accusing France of “genocide” during its more than 130-year occupation of Algeria.

Then, in 2019, a vast protest movement toppled the autocratic leader after two decades in power — but the new regime has kept up the anti-French discourse.

Observers say however that cooperation behind closed doors has been surprisingly close.

In 2013, Algeria allowed French forces to use its airspace to reach Mali, where they were battling extremists.

“French-Algerian relations are good when they’re in secret. They’re more hostile when they’re in public,” said Naoufel Brahimi El Mili, who has written a book on 60 years of “secret stories” between the two countries.

When Emmanuel Macron became president, he had good relations with Algeria.

Visiting Algiers during his campaign in February 2017, he described colonisation as a “crime against humanity”.

After his election, he made gestures aimed at healing past wounds on both sides of the Mediterranean.

But he refused to apologise for colonialism, a highly sensitive topic in France, which for decades saw Algeria as an integral part of French territory and where far-right discourse has been escalating.

Comments reported last October dampened hopes around reconciliation.

Macron accused Algeria’s “political-military system” of rewriting history and fomenting “hatred towards France”.

In remarks to descendants of independence fighters, reported by Le Monde, he also questioned whether Algeria had existed as a nation before the French invasion in the 1800s.

Once again, Algeria withdrew its ambassador.

‘Algeria votes Macron’ 

Now, weeks ahead of the French presidential election in April, relations appear to be looking up again.

Millions of French citizens of Algerian origin and descendants of Europeans who left after independence are among those casting votes.

“Algeria will vote for Macron,” said author El Mili. “Algerians are convinced that a Macron II will be bolder.”

Xavier Driencourt, a former French ambassador to Algeria, shared that view.

“They don’t want [candidate] Valerie Pecresse who has a fairly right-wing tone, and definitely not [Eric] Zemmour or Marine Le Pen,” he said, referring to conservative Pecresse and two far-right presidential hopefuls.

But much remains to be done. In recent years Algeria has diversified its international ties, with China becoming its main trade partner.

Martinez from Sciences Po said Macron’s comments had done a lot of damage.

“They’ll go back to the drawing board, and try to see what they can agree on,” he said.

Former envoy Driencourt said “it takes two sides to have a relationship”.

Would Algeria be interested after the election?

“I’m not very optimistic,” he said.

BEIRUT — Once the economy's crown jewel, Lebanon's banks are shutting branches and laying off employees in droves, resizing to the bleak reality of a crisis they are widely blamed for.

Before the onset in 2019 of a financial collapse deemed one of the world's worst since the 1850s by the World Bank, the small Mediterranean country had an oversized but prosperous banking sector.

The capital Beirut was a booming regional financial hub, attracting savers keen to profit from high interest rates and banking secrecy laws.

But more than two years into the crisis, the reputation of Lebanese lenders has been shredded.

A dizzying currency collapse, coupled with banks imposing strict withdrawal limits and prohibiting transfers abroad, has left ordinary depositors watching on helplessly as their savings evaporate.

And yet bankers stand accused of bypassing those exact same capital controls, stoking the crisis by helping the political elite squirrel billions of dollars overseas.

Their trust destroyed, citizens now keep new income well away from the banks, which in turn are deprived of money they could lend.

"The whole banking system today is made up of zombie banks," said economic analyst Patrick Mardini.

"They don't work as banks anymore — they don't give loans, they don't take new deposits."

'Abandoned country' 

As a result, the industry has been forced to scale back its operations.

In 2019, Lebanon ranked second in the region for bank branches per 100,000 people, according to the World Bank, and held a total of around $150 billion in deposits.

Deposits by Arab investors and Lebanese expatriates propelled the banking sector to peak at three times the value of national economic output.

But more than 160 branches have closed since the end of 2018, leaving a total of 919 branches operating across the country, according to the Association of Banks in Lebanon (ABL).

The number of employees has dropped by around 5,900, reducing the sector’s workforce to roughly 20,000 late last year.

“Lebanon is an abandoned country,” ABL chief Salim Sfeir told AFP, referring to negligence by the nation’s authorities.

The association claims the sector has been “forced to adapt to the contraction of the economy”, even as others blame the banks for overall economic activity plunging by more than half since 2019.

The Lebanese pound, officially pegged at 1,507 to the greenback since 1997, has lost more than 90 per cent of its value on the black market.

The slide has prompted banks to adopt a plethora of exchange rates for transactions even though the official rate remains unchanged.

Those who hold dollar accounts have mostly had to withdraw cash in Lebanese pounds and at a fraction of the black market rate.

“If we apply international accounting standards, almost all Lebanese banks are insolvent,” investment banker Jean Riachi said.

‘Exit the market’ 

Lebanon’s government defaulted on its foreign debt in 2020, stymying the country’s hopes of quickly securing new international credit or donor money to stem the crisis.

The ruling elite, beset by internal rifts that have repeatedly left the country without a government, has yet to agree on an economic recovery plan with international creditors.

Disagreements between the government, the central bank and commercial banks over the scale of financial sector losses have dogged talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that first started nearly two years ago.

In December, the government of Prime Minister Najib Mikati set financial sector losses at around $69 billion in a crucial step towards advancing IMF talks.

But while the global lender said early this month that efforts to agree on a rescue package have progressed, it made clear more work was needed, especially in terms of “restructuring of the financial sector”.

The analyst Mardini said bank restructuring proposals have been discussed by several governments.

Central bank chief Riad Salameh has said banks that are unable to lend must “exit the market”.

But meaningful progress on restructuring has been impeded by a political elite who maintain large shares in some of the main banks, according to Mardini.

For out-of-pocket depositors, the details of any restructuring arrangements are a secondary concern.

“I just want to recover my savings,” said Hicham, a businessman who asked to use his first name only over privacy concerns.

“All the parties concerned must assume their responsibilities.”

KHARTOUM — A Sudanese man was shot dead Sunday as security forces cracked down on rallies against last year’s military coup, medics said, as a UN rights expert arrived in the country.

Regular protests have rocked the northeast African country since army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan led a military takeover in October, sparking international condemnation.

United Nations human rights expert Adama Dieng is visiting Sudan until Thursday, on a trip initially planned for last month but postponed at the request of Sudanese authorities.

A 51-year-old man was hit Sunday with “a live bullet to the chest”, the Sudanese Doctors’ Committee said, bringing the death toll in a crackdown on anti-coup protests to 82.

“The martyr was a patient at a hospital in Khartoum North... and went out to get some air after struggling with shortness of breath due to the heavy firing of tear gas which filled the hospital ward,” the committee said, adding that he was then shot dead.

Thousands had rallied in the capital Khartoum on Sunday, carrying Sudanese flags and posters of others killed during demonstrations in recent months, an AFP correspondent said.

Security forces fired tear gas and wounded several protesters who were heading toward the presidential palace, the correspondent said, while tear gas was also used in nearby Omdurman and North Khartoum.

“We are ready to protest all year,” one demonstrator, 24-year-old Thoyaba Ahmed, told AFP, while another, Wadah Khaled, said: “We want to rectify our country’s situation to have a good future.”

“We need to make sacrifices to resolve the country’s issues,” said 25-year-old Arij Salah, another demonstrator.

The October takeover derailed a transition painstakingly negotiated between military and civilian leaders following the 2019 ouster of president Omar Al Bashir.

While Sudan has repeatedly denied opening fire on protesters, Human Rights Watch has quoted witnesses detailing how the security forces have used both “live ammunition” and fired tear gas canisters “directly” at crowds, a tactic that can be deadly at close quarters.

UN special representative Volker Perthes said on Twitter Sunday that he met with rights expert Dieng on “his first official visit” to Sudan.

“Dieng will meet with senior Sudanese government officials, representatives of civil society organisations, human rights defenders, heads of UN entities, and diplomats,” the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement this week.

Separately, dozens rallied outside a court complex in Khartoum to protest against the trial of several Bashir-era figures, an AFP correspondent said.

Among those on trial is former foreign minister Ibrahim Ghandour, who faces charges over plotting a coup in 2020.

Ghandour’s family said last month that he had begun a hunger strike in prison, along with several ex-regime officials.