Poor significance of “Vice President from Darfur”

By Gamal A Adam

November 16, 2009 — The theme of a “Vice President from Darfur” has been a recurring issue on Sudanese websites for the last few weeks. Different sources that have discussed the issue have underlined the fact that it emanated from the National Congress Party (NCP) during one of its recent meetings and that Omer Albashir has been serious in considering it. Some of these sources went as far as pointing out that the person who is expected to represent Darfur in that position will be a leading member of the Popular Congress Party because that might, according to these sources, be a suitable dowry with which the National Congress Party can remarry the Popular Congress Party after their divorce of 1999.

However, this discussion raises a number of questions. Notably: “Is the Sudanese Problem in Darfur resolvable by reconciliation between the National Congress Party and the Popular Congress party through the position of Vice President? Has the Darfur problem only come to the fore as a result of conflict over positions between northern and western Sudanese in National Islamic Front (NIF) before 1999? Since when was the NIF representative of Darfur to the point that its reestablishment will automatically lead to the resolution of the region’s problems? If the position of Vice President was really the solution to the problems of marginalized regions in Sudan why has the position of First Vice President not solved the problem of Southern Sudan? And can even the position of President from a marginalized region solve the problem of Darfur, Southern Sudan or Eastern Sudan while the Sudanese state continues to be like a corporate enterprise run by individuals from the arbized-Nubian tribes of Ja’alyeen, Shaiguia and Danagla?

Those who think that the Darfur problem is resolvable through the creation of new positions are deliberately misinterpreting the problem of the region. These include the social, economic and education destruction specialists in National Congress Party and their puppets from Darfur whose main functions include the occupation of lower ranks in that party, patronage positions invented for them and surveillance against innocent Darfuris. My focus in the following pages is on those who have transformed the country into a tribal enterprise and who are now marketing the position of vice president for the Darfur cause.

A quick review of the National Islamic Front demonstrates that its members are parasites that have been trained in corruption, dependence, hostility and destruction. For those Sudanese people who were students in the 1980s- the time when the NIF started to thrive- can attest to the fact that the NIF isolated students who joined its ranks and trained them to hate everybody who was not a member of their organization. From personal recollection most of the secondary school students who were recruited as NIF members did so as a result of inducements by senior members of that organization. They would take the kids (secondary school students) for lavish picnics and start the process of stripping them of good values which they came with to school from home. They would teach and make them sing jihad songs, talk to them about members of their organization who were leading figures of university student unions particularly University of Khartoum’s student union, teach them biographies of Sudanese and foreign Islamists (e.g. Hassan Alturabi, Hassan Albanna, Abdelhamid Kishik, etc.) and take them to special meetings in evenings and weekends in homes of leading NIF members where they were told that Islamic World in general and Sudan in particular were in an eminent danger and that they (poor kids) were the saviors of Sudan and the Islamic World. They were also taught to think that those who were not members of their organization were potential enemies.

In universities, the National Islamic Front trained the students, whom it already acculturated, in harming other students and disturbing the function of these educational institutions. For example, during the five years which I spent as a student in the University of Khartoum, seven serious confrontations occurred between students or between students and professors. All of these confrontations involved NIF students who were always the main initiators of every one of these confrontations. They used iron bars, knives, and even poisonous gases which they stole from university’s chemistry laboratories in order to harm other students. In those five years, the NIF’s bearded and angry students have forced the university to suspend its academic year for several months twice. Although the university was supposed to be a place for studying and conducting research for the advancement of human knowledge, members of the National Islamic Front were using it as a training camp for their terrorist activities. Its students’ main slogan at the time was jama’a tahra aw la ja’ma literally meaning “a clean university or no university”. The idea behind this slogan was that either they- NIF students- should be the ones leading the university’s student union all the time or else the university should close its doors. They associated themselves with “purity and cleanliness” and stereotyped the other students from all the components of Sudanese society as “dirty and impure”. They were trained to see every single Sudanese person who was not a member of their terrorist organization, including even their own mothers and fathers, as enemies. What increased the hostility of NIF members against the non-NIF university students was the fact that they squandered a lot of money during the student elections. Their candidates usually wore very expensive suits and ties like western diplomats or businessmen, rigged votes, and paid some independent students who did not have firm positions to sell their votes to them. They found it difficult to accept defeat evidenced by the fact that they spent vast sums of money to ensure success and even rigged the ballot box. In sum, the National Islamic Front transformed Sudanese universities into institutions devoted to producing shallow minded belligerent predators.

In addition to the destruction of educational institutions, the National Islamic Front gradually destroyed the country’s economy by adopting completely unethical ways of conducting business in the market. In a study with the title of The Parasitic Economy, professors Ibrahim Alkarsani and Alwathig Kameer uncovered the disaster which the NIF caused in Sudan. The authors showed that NIF leaders established ghost banks and other companies whose main function was corruption and acted in a manner that was completely contrary to the norms of the regular Sudanese business community. Professor Alkarsani has also indicated that the NIF and its unethical business behaviors were the main contributors to the 1984-85 famine in Darfur. Another point of which professors Alkarsani and Kameer probably forgot to discuss is the NIF’s support to Ja’afer Numeiri against Ahmed Ibrahim Direij, the then governor of the region, who wanted to declare Darfur as a disaster region. Direij wanted to open a window for foreign aid since the central government was unwilling to do so. The NIF corrupt companies caused a serious scarcity of sorghum in the market. The NIF also caused a similar disastrous problem in 1990-1991. Its government put forward a condition that the international relief organizations should just transport the relief they provided to Kurdufan and it should be responsible for their transportation from Kurdufan to Darfur and their distribution within Darfur thereafter. However, the government held the relief in Kurdufan until it was rotten.

The National Islamic Front was not only behind the economic hardship of Darfuris, it was also a major player in the destruction of the social infrastructure in the region. Since their ideology has made them see the other Sudanese as enemies, the NIF leaders wanted to see the Darfur population divided and, like their counterparts in the Umma party, they have been behind the attribution of racial meanings to the signifiers Arab and Zurga in the region and provided support to one of the conflicting parties. A member of the command council of the so-called Revolution for the National Salvation, Faisal Ali Abu Saleh, who was also minister of interior resigned in 1991, has underlined that one of the reasons which forced him to resign was the involvement of leading individuals from the NIF in armed robbery and arming of some groups against others in Darfur. Moreover, the NIF, since the 1990s, decided to change the social geography of the region by adopting all possible strategies to put particular groups at risk. The crimes it committed are now obvious to all internationally- except to the dictators of the Arab League and most of their counterparts in the African Union- the crimes whose dimension ranges from war crimes and crimes against humanity to genocide depending on the position of the speaker in the continuum of the appreciation of human value.

In sum, the NIF history is known for exploitation, hostility and hypocrisy in the region, and none of its current members in National Congress Party, Popular Congress Party or Justice and Equality Movement would ever enjoy any support of Darfur people. Their ideological underpinnings have uprooted them from the region and its culture and they have in fact just victimized the region and its people for their ideological objectives. But other questions that need to be dealt with are: Is there any role that a Vice President from Darfur can play to benefit the region and its people in a state (Sudanese state) that has become a tribal enterprise? Can even a President from Darfur do something genuine in Darfur in such an enterprise? And is the problem of Sudan- which has always been one but manifested in different regions, in different forms, and different times- resolvable through positions which the executive of that enterprise, Omer Albashir, has recommended? And is the Sudanese problem a problem of positions or a problem of institutions that create stupid leaders when it comes to the leadership of the country?

It is obvious to almost every single Sudanese person and to foreigners specializing on or just working in Sudan that its state has been run since independence by elements from the Danagla, Ja’alyeen and Shaiguia. They have tried to create a social foundation that does not correspond to the reality of the majority of the population by identifying the country as an Arab-Islamic country. Since this point they have endeavored to make it happen on the ground even when people from Arab countries do not consider such Sudanese as part of them. The rulers of the country have utilized state institutions such as schools and the media to transform the Sudanese into Arabs and mobilized all mechanisms of power to forcefully impose that identity on them and strip them of the African components of their identity. However, this forceful imposition of the Arab identity has not worked for most of the Sudanese people, particularly those of them whose mother tongue is not Arabic. This has been one of the main causes of the Sudanese problem because those who have been weeding out other components of Sudanese culture and identity to enforce Arab identity and culture, are themselves sitting on the margins of Arab world.

Today, even the tribal enterprise that Albashir and his clique created has turned into a strongly nepotistic system. Albashir and his cadre have excluded even the men and women of wisdom from the above stated tribes, privatized all state institutions whose shares they hold with their foreign partners, and gradually replaced the Sudanese army and police by special militias whose objective is to protect the interests of Omer Albashir, Ali Osman, Salah Ghosh, ‘Awad Aljaz, Naf’i Ali, Abdulrahim Hussein, a few other individuals, and their family members. Consequently it remains to be seen how exactly Mbeki’s Panel’s recommendation that the Sudanese army and police are to be responsible in establishing peace and security in the region, because there is no longer a national army or police in Sudan. The so-called Sudanese army and police are now led by commanders related to abovementioned individuals, their family members, and settlers that are brought to Darfur from West African countries known as Janjaweed. Therefore, any peace process will never lead to sustainable peace if it does not seriously consider the dismantling of all armed groups including the so-called Sudanese army and police because they are, in fact, militias of Albashir and his clique.

There is consequently, no hope that Albashir or his clique can bring any sustainable peace to Sudan because their cultural dispositions prevent them from seeing the fact that Sudan is the home for all the Sudanese regardless of their backgrounds and that all of them should have equal rights and obligations as its citizens. With the idea of Vice President from Darfur, Albashir and his clique just want to find a way to prolong their domination of power which is deeply harmful to any peace, development and prosperity of the country. If the positions were a solution to the Sudanese problem, the positions of First Vice president, Chief Assistant, and Assistant would have made the peace sustainable in Southern Sudan, Darfur and Eastern Sudan respectively. But Sudan’s problem is a problem of institutions and not a problem of positions.

Gamal A. Adam is a Sudanese residing in Canada [email protected].