Sudan TV incites holy war
Editorial, The Khartoum Monitor
October 3, 2005 — The Sudanese national television gives substantive evidence every day that it operates its programmes from another planet several light years away from our peace hungry mother earth.
The national TV seems unaware of the CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement) and the Government of National Unity (GNU).
Our national TV still lives in the recent past when the civil war in the Sudan was projected as between Islam and the infidels of southern Sudan.
This had been the banner the national television was generously sponsored to inculcate in the minds of the Sudanese youth who were summoned in tens of thousands to go to the south to either attain martyrdom or victory over the southern infidels.
One such lavishly funded programme to undertake coordination and dissemination of anti-southern propaganda was called “Fi Sahat al Fida”, roughly translates in English “In the battlefields of sacrifice”.
With the CPA and formation of GNU, Sudanese people, in both north and south, have taken it for granted that such programmes would be the first to be swept under the carpet of disinformation and religious chauvinism.
Sadly enough, the opposite is what is being cherished and implemented by our national TV.
Last Friday 30 September, the national TV presented a new edition of the very programme with the same old pro-war and anti southern themes.
If anything, the national TV is indeed insensitive to sentiments and privacies of the families whose sons had fallen victims of the civil war, no matter, be they SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement) or NCP (National Congress Party) loyalists.
The national TV by running “Fi Sahat al Fida” programme is covertly but suggestively telling the northern masses that the very killers of their children are now in the Republican Palace and in every ministry in Khartoum.
The programme is strongly and overtly reminiscent of the painful war wounds that the entire Sudanese people want to forget. Nothing can dissuade the viewers from interpreting the national TV as trying to tell the SPLM partner and the non-fundamentalist peace loving Sudanese people that the banner of Islam is not yet hoisted in the battlefields of sacrifice in southern Sudan.
Is there anything so diabolic and ruinous in propositions that could pose threats to the Sudanese CPA?
The overarching national characteristics of our TV are invisible under the reign of the Government of National Unity. The national TV still runs its programmes and political panels under the umbrella of the National Salvation Revolution, and takes Sudan as being manned and masterminded by the “victorious” NCP leadership.
The SPLM and other forces in GNU are seemingly “indefinite articles” and their leaderships “common nouns”.
For God’s sake, and in the name of peace and human decency, the SPLM and the other partners in GNU, including the NCP ministers, should collectively stop the impoliteness, insensitivity and awful anti-public mannerism being practised by the national TV.
From whatever planet it operates, the national TV must descend to our mother earth and start preaching the CPA as the order of the day in Sudan.
It should stop disseminating hatred, intolerance, bigotry or anything suggestive of that to the Sudanese people.
Please, our national TV, wash your mouth and watch your steps.