KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan's president promised a future of freedom and open government on Saturday in a strikingly conciliatory speech following a week of small protests in Sudan and an uprising in neighboring Egypt.

Omar Hassan al-Bashir's address to supporters on the outskirts of Khartoum was short on detail and made only a glancing reference to recent unrest but was notable for its disarming rhetoric.
“We open the door for freedom. We have nothing to fear from freedom ... Freedom is guaranteed by the constitution,” Bashir told the crowd.
“Anybody who wants to make chaos, we will deal with him according to the law. Our doors and our hearts and our hands are open without fear.”
Young Sudanese have mounted a series of short-lived demonstrations across the north in recent weeks complaining about price rises, and calling for political change and an end to human rights abuses.
Facebook pages and other social networking websites said the protests were inspired by the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. In each case witnesses said police, sometimes armed with batons and teargas, moved in quickly to end the protests.
Bashir's government is under additional economic and political pressure as it waits for the widely expected secession of the country's south, the source of most of its oil.
Southerners overwhelmingly voted to declare independence in a referendum in January, according to early results, in a vote promised in a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war with the north.
He reminded the crowd that his National Congress Party (NCP) had also won the support of most northerners in last year's presidential and parliamentary elections.