Senegalese opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, has gone back on hunger strike.
Sonko ended his hunger strike after influential leaders prevailed on him as his health deteriorated in prison.
However, few days after a district court overturned his removal from the electoral roll, Sonko posted on his social media platforms announcing his decision to continue protesting against his imprisonment.
He addressed his supporters: “I thank God and invite you today, more than ever, to more commitment, determination and solidarity in the face of this dictatorship with less than five months left. I remind you accordingly our constitutional right to resistance.
As for us, we can only resort to the means of resistance that our current situation allows.
This is why I decided to go back on hunger strike:
– to mark my solidarity with our valiant patriotic sisters unjustly arrested for expressing their political opinions, then screwed and detained for several months at the Liberty 6 penal camp and in other prisons, and today deprived, for some, of any contact with their loved ones, simply for exercising their legitimate right to resort to hunger strike;
– to protest against my arbitrary and electoral detention, and that of hundreds of patriots, and demand an end to it.
Dear compatriots, from here and in the diaspora, dear activists and sympathizers.
I invite you to more perseverance and combativity, determination and endurance.
They are fighting for the next five months. We are fighting for the next 50 years.”
Yesterday, activist Bentaleb Sow decided to follow in the footsteps of his leader. Reports emerging from Rebeuss indicated that he has started a hunger strike too.
Like Ousmane Sonko, he also intends to “support the strike of the women of the penal camp prison and the 182 strikers of the Ziguinchor prison”.
Bentaleb Sow denounced his “arbitrary detention without legal basis while the first concerned, for which” he says he was “kidnapped as well as some of his alleged accomplices have been released”.
Bentaleb Sow is part of the list of people arrested after the visit of French lawyer Juan Branco to Senegal when access to Senegalese territory was prohibited.
