The Black Belt
By Ahmed Elzobier
November 1, 2006 — It’s quite disturbing and demoralizing when you hear a human rights activist saying, “There is nothing we could do and these things happen all the time, all over the place”. Such helplessness in a country that appears so capable of producing suffering and death fills you with despair. But people also need to be reminded of Edmund Burke’s advice – “All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing”.
According to martial arts ranking the “black belt” is often considered the highest belt color one can attain and represents the greatest skill level. Ironically, this borrowed metaphor has entered the politics of ethnicity and marginalization in Sudan and the new usage now equates blackness with fear, undesirability, poverty, ugliness and hate.
Dr Hassan Makki, a leading Islamist intellectual, once complained that Khartoum was surrounded by a black belt. Omer Ahmed El Haj in Al Intibaha (the official northern Sudanese separatist daily newspaper) warned his fellow northern Sudanese living in Khartoum about the enemy living within that wears a black belt. Al Wasila Hassan Manofli, the commissioner of Al Kamleen locality, has internalized these metaphors and has successfully emerged as the self-appointed vanguard in this undeclared war against the black belt by destroyed Dar Al Salam on 16/08/06.
I asked a young female northern Sudanese journalist, one of the first to raise the alarm about the predicament of Dar Al Salam residents, why the local authority needs to be so cruel to these people? She replied, “I have no idea about that, but according to Dar Al Salam residents this is happening to them because they are (Gharaba1)”, (i.e. coming from western Sudan). For Dar Al Salam people this is a blatant act of racism informed by the widely accepted and unchecked prejudices against the people from Darfur and Kordofan. If someone was interested in tracing what’s happening in Darfur, Dar Al Salam and other IDP camps, where the forced relocation policy has repeatedly been implemented with a high degree of cruelty, this could be the right place to start. A place where deeply seated prejudices can turn into policies designed to cause maximum hurt and suffering for its victims.
Dar Al Salam–(Al Bagier) is situated 30 miles southeast of Khartoum along the highway towards Madani, the second biggest city in Sudan. Since the 1980s a number of Sudanese from western Sudan, (Darfur and Kordofan) have resided in this location during the famine of that period, most of them are workers in local factories around Al Bagier area.
Saheel Saeed is an agile and bubbly figure representing a new breed of brave investigative journalists in Sudan. While Khartoum’s residents were briskly trying to make the most out of the last two hours of the final day of Ramadan, we have embarked on an emotional journey towards Dar Al Salam. Along the way Saheel explained to me the background and history of Dar Al Salam, interrupted only by my silly questions about the new villas and houses that had started to pop up along both sides of the Khartoum to Madani road2. It turns out Dar Al Salam, which literally means “Land of Peace”, has been sold to a dubious Egyptian businessman named Ahmed Bahjet and then the land ironically renamed Dream Land. According to Murtad Al Ghali, prominent columnist in Al Ayam newspaper, “The forced relocation from the Dream Land is our Sudanese nightmare”.
Saheel explained in his article on the 18/08/06, that there was an agreement between the residents and the local authority dating back to 29/01/06, which included land compensation, distribution of new land, and then four months after receiving the new land contract they would be able to move to their new location. Al Sudani reported the forced relocation plan on the 27/05/06. The local authority responded by issuing a statement to the press saying they would not relocate any family unless they had received their new land contract, and they would make sure to provide building materials, and water facilities.
Then, on 16/08/06, thousands of heavily armed policemen and several tanks surrounded Dar Al Salam early that morning and at 8am a bulldozer started randomly demolishing hundreds of houses with less than five minutes notice given to the families. All the talks with the officers in charge about the agreement with the authority about the new relocation area and compensation were ineffective. No time had been given to the residents to collect their belongings. There were reports of some members of the village popular committee being arrested and not allowed to make any phone calls. A number of gunshots were heard.
Many UN agencies and human rights organizations offered to provide all necessary assistance to the local authority to ensure that any relocation of the people of Dar Al Salam took place on the basis of mutual understanding and with due regard to the rights and needs of the residents. But all this fell on deaf ears and the local authority went ahead with its relocation defying all protests from opposition parties, the SPLM, journalists and human rights organizations.
Despite the dusty road, the smoldering heat and the small car jumping up and down on the bumpy road, Saheel continued his passionate retelling of the eviction story. I still cannot figure out the need to be so harsh and cruel to anyone, let alone to your own people. The key phrase is “your own people”. Dream Land is only for the rich foreign investors. The new relocation is five miles away from the main highway, all the government promises turned out to be a stream of lies. The only thing they did was dig one borehole for water, and nothing else. According to residence of Dar Al Salam, “We have been thrown into no man’s land and they refused us any humanitarian assistance. Using only torn out plastic and cartoon for shelter. The children have no schools to go to and the cost of transport from this new place has doubled. It costs us 7,000 pound just for transport to Khartoum and most of these people do not earn more than 10,000 pound a day, so only 3,000 pound a day is available for your family. We are not allowed to build toilets so people just use the surrounding land as a public toilet. It is not hygienic and many people, especially children, get sick from the harsh new environment, and no health clinic to treat them, we have been thrown hear to die and no one care”.
These people have been thrown into place where they are expected once again to start from scratch after 20 years, and no one will even guarantee that this new place is going to be their permanent residence. The sense of helplessness, despair and deep feeling of injustice is overwhelming you can see it in the eyes of the curious children, the old dignified men of the camp. But from the local authority point of view the eviction was successfully completed in a few hours to the satisfaction of the new owner’s lust for land, and their own greed for the millions of dollars they have pocketed from the deal.
The Egyptian establishment has made sure throughout post-independence Sudan that the Sudanese elites will be left with no alternative other than to become subservient, docile, obedient, and ready to comply with their master’s demand. That’s may be why Saheel, my companion in this journey, was so passionately against forced relocation. His own people (Al Halfween from far northern Sudan near the border with Egypt) were relocated in the early 1960s from Wadi Halfa to New Halfa because of the Aswan Dam in Egypt – for him that was the first Sudanese sacrifice for their Egyptian master. (This article is not going to turn into an Egypt-bashing but we are simply trying to explain the imbalance of the relationship with our northern neighbor), maybe for us to understand this psychotic relationship it’s worth quoting Steve Biko’s words, “The oppressed mind is the most powerful weapon an oppressor has”. In this regard the Sudanese elites have always delivered; and all the rhetoric about national sovereignty is meaningless when they are not capable of protecting the rights of their people.
A few months ago on the 30/12/05 the Egyptian authorities caused the deaths of 25 Sudanese refugees in Cairo, including women and children. They were staging a public sit-in for three months protesting against their treatment by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and were demanding relocation to a third country. 4,000 officers cordoned off the Sudanese encampment, fired water cannons at them and beat them indiscriminately. Hundreds were dragged into buses and transferred to unknown destinations. It’s no wonder that most of these Sudanese were from the south and western Sudan. The reaction of the Sudan government was typical and consistent with the mind-set that operates at home, and of course they blamed their own people (the victims) for their deaths and mistreatment.
The destiny of Sudanese as refugees in Egypt has been mistreatment and death – their destiny at home is not really different, it turns out to be a nightmare to fulfill an Egyptian businessman’s dream as in Dar Al Salam. Once again the destitute and the impoverished from the south and western Sudan pay the price for being the weakest link in this unequal relationship with Egypt.
In his recent article published in Sudan Tribune explaining John Garang’s vision for a new Sudan, Elwathig Kameir argued that, “The fish rots from the head and not from the tail! It is the Sudanese state, epitomized by the power structure in the center, that needs to be radically restructured in order to accommodate Sudan’s manifold diversity and attend to all forms of exclusion and marginalization of its people”.
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan has carefully carved out an identity that’s centered around an assumed Arab-Islamic identity, which by default always despises anything African. This profound reality in northern Sudan is so deeply entrenched and built into the culture and prevailing mind-set, and it causes such havoc, terror and destruction in our land that the whole world has to clamor to save us from our own suicidal mission to destroy our black belt.
* Ahmed Elzobier, is a Sudanese writer and Human rights activist. He can be reached at [email protected]