Sudan: The Doomsday Cult

By Ahmed Sam*

Feb 5, 2007 — Sudan is a country that fills you with despair and hopelessness, doom and gloom are all around. You have to be incurably optimistic to share the faith shown by the English poet John Masefield when he wrote this four-line squib:

– I have seen flowers come in stony places,
– And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
– And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races.
– So I trust, too.

Political regimes are sometimes capable of producing societies which reflect the regime’s true face. Two images will always be imprinted in your mind symbolising the two extreme social strata that exist in Sudan today – the faces of the beggars, socially humiliated, scorned, their human dignity stripped away; and the contrasting faces of the smug, self-satisfied, deceitful and scheming super-rich who have no regard for the suffering of their countrymen, and who think the National Congress Party (NCP) is a wonderful organisation. These two images will haunt you whenever you wander around the urban jungle of Khartoum. The town is a zone of chaos, full of the unemployed, beggars, street-sellers, peddlers, brokers, transport seat touts, everyone is selling something to someone.

The political scene is also more chaotic since the difficult relationship between the NCP and the Sudan Popular Liberation Movement (SPLM) became public during the second anniversary of the peace agreement on 9th Jan 07. These unlikely bedfellows with parallel political positions and who had been forced into a complex peace process have begun to trade insults, accusations and counter accusations.

However, it would not be an overstatement to claim that the NCP is our Sudanese version of Fascism, although not many people outside Sudan knew this simple fact before the recent tragic event in Darfur. Historically, this party with its multiple names – National Islamic Front, Islamic Charter, National Congress Party or the Popular National Party – representing the Islamic movement in Sudan, has managed single-handedly during the last 17 years to cause the deaths of millions of Sudanese in pursuit of a debunked ideological scheme. The political crew that are in charge of the NCP, apparently feeling desperate and professing doom and destruction for the whole country and its people, are now promoting death as a final solution, not only for themselves but for the entire nation. This is a Jim Jones styled cult and Sudan is their Jonestown. If this public posturing from some NCP leaders is taken seriously it could gather momentum and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The NCP, humiliated in Addis Ababa at the recent African Union conference, betrayed by Egypt and Libya on the issue of the African Union presidency, and incensed by the silence of the Arab nations, now feel hated by the African nations. They have become extremely paranoid, lashing out and pointing fingers at everybody; Sudanese opposition parties, SPLM, SLM, the USA, UN, Europe, African nations like Chad, and now Libya, Egypt and the Arab Nations. The NCP feels rejected everywhere at home and abroad and they’re haunted by the spectre of being a pariah state. Now the NCP’s only hope of survival is pinned on China, not on their African, Arab or Muslims brothers, but on a secular state run by a Communist party. Of course, the only person who could really express the frame of mind of the NCP is Al Tayab Mustfa, the editor of Al-Intibaha (the official newspaper of hate in Sudan). Last week he wrote: “Look at the scared Africans dummies; it was too much for us to ask them to turn into living beings full of dignity, pride and moral values. These traits have nothing to do with them; they are scared and frightened and have lost their dignity. They are defeated and psychologically colonized, suffering from an inferiority complex towards white people”.

A traditional, local Sudanese song goes something like this: “The Vultures are flying surrounding their bodies”. The words describe the horrible death of the enemy and how their bodies are left for the vultures to rip to pieces. This song’s metaphor has been a main feature in the recent popular defence forces celebration organised by the NCP in Khartoum. The cult-like audience reacted hysterically to the song, even the President Omar al-Bashir jumped off his seat and started to dance. Someone commented that this is the President’s favourite song, and of course it celebrates death. The President’s close buddy the Defence Minister started to jump up and down beside him as if struck by an electric shock. The Defence Minister has always used the expression that the “Underground is better for us than Overground”, also a metaphor for death and a celebration of the cemetery as a solution.

The Presidential Advisor, Dr. Nafie ali Nafie, during his visit to Darfur on Wednesday Jan. 30th, reiterated another infamous Sudanese proverb usually cited by the ignorant and idiotic – he reportedly said, “Let the thinness have a hole”. This is a direct appeal to his paramilitary Janjaweed audience in Darfur, inciting more violence and disregard for the suffering already endured by the people of the region. Of course no one should anticipate contrition from Dr. Nafie ali Nafie. He is a notorious psychopath who, following studies in California where he somehow obtained a PhD, returned to Sudan to become the architect of suffering and torture in the country after becoming the head of security forces. During the 1990s he was involved in the methodical torture of political activists in what have become known as the “Ghost Houses”.

Now the NCP genuinely fear that the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to the letter could lead to the Party’s power structure being dismantled completely. The Sudanese Presidential Advisor Mustafa Osman Ismail told the press on 31 Jan 07 that, “The United States is working to dismantle the National Congress Party regime through peace deals and international human rights organizations”. The CPA implementation had initially gained them an unexpected legitimacy from the international community that they’d hardly dreamed of – now the same CPA has started to scare them. One must seriously wonder what options the NCP have apart from the Doomsday scenario that Al-Intibaha is predicting and working hard to make happen.

Some elements in the NCP keep repeating that their religious beliefs are far more important than their country and that for them the destruction of Sudan is irrelevant. Not many take these ‘religious belief’ sound bites seriously any more, for the NCP this just a code for political and economic power. Although, in the progress towards complete chaos or the collapse of Sudan as a state, they are the ones who are bound to lose more than anyone else, given the magnitude of accumulated wealth and investment companies, properties and political power they posses.

This is just posturing to scare the faint-hearted, and in reality they know they have run out of options and are scared to death that the inevitable fate that awaits them may be something similar to that of Slobodan Milosevic. Or dare I say it, of Saddam Hussein.

* The author is a Sudanese writer and human rights activist.