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KHARTOUM, Sudan—The Blue and the White Nile rivers join in this vast and grimy metropolis. Some people say they can clearly distinguish the two colors when flying into Khartoum International Airport. Like many things in Khartoum, this seems to be an illusion. On the numerous occasions that I flew over the city on my way to, or returning from, the war-torn Darfur region to the west, they both looked murky to me.
Khartoum is also the place where the Arab world meets Africa—and where both cultures diverge. Although the majority of Sudan’s population are black Africans, an Arab elite with ancestral Egyptian roots has ruled the continent’s largest country since independence in 1956.
It is from Khartoum that a war has been waged against a rebellion in the marginalized oil-rich African south for the past 21 years. Today, it has become the headquarters for a massive international humanitarian and diplomatic effort to stem the conflict in Darfur, which erupted in 2002 when black African insurgents rose up against the government. A murderous rampage to quash the rebellion, primarily carried out by Arab militias known as Janjaweed, allegedly armed and supported by Khartoum, has left nearly 2 million people homeless and tens of thousands of civilians dead.
When I first arrived in Khartoum in August, the faces of Sudan’s two worlds were immediately apparent. Northern Arabic-speaking Sudanese men wearing skull caps and long white gowns known as djellibiyah drive the battered yellow taxis, stroll the heat-drenched dusty streets, and sip thick Sudanese coffee and fruit juice in the lobby of the Hilton. They also formed the mobs of men sent by the government to protest international intervention in Sudan’s affairs in front of the main U.N. compound where I worked as a humanitarian press officer earlier this year. Meanwhile, the government’s top brass, led by President Omar al-Bashir, was making now seemingly empty promises to end the violence in Darfur that continues to ravage the region today.
The white-gloved men who hold the door open for visitors and carry their luggage to their expensive rooms in overpriced, shabby hotels, on the other hand, look very different. Tall, lanky, and with inky black skin, they greet the guests, increasingly from international aid and humanitarian funding agencies, in English. Their foreheads often etched with raised, horizontal scars—a sign of the Dinka tribe—they are part of the enormous southern Sudanese diaspora who fled from their home villages during the two-decadelong war between Khartoum and southern rebels. A final peace agreement to end the 21-year-old war, Africa’s longest, is imminent. [Update: At a Nov. 18 special meeting of the U.N. Security Council held in Nairobi, Kenya, the Sudanese government officials indicated that a peace accord will be signed by the end of 2004.]
Many of the same men work as guards for the United Nations and other agencies. Most of them complain about the hot and dusty city, as foreign to them as it is to the hordes of visitors from the West. Many told me they are anxiously waiting for a peace pact to come through between the government and the southern rebels, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army, so they can return to their lush homelands in the south. It is estimated that up to 2 million southerners are living in the north, either in refugee camps, shanty towns, or integrated into Khartoum itself.
Khartoum is indeed an unforgiving place rife with contradictions. Unrelenting heat is abated only by occasional evening rains, often accompanied by fierce and choking red dust storms called “haboobs,” which envelop the city. Packs of vicious, wild dogs roam the streets at night. Alcohol is illegal in this Islamic republic that subscribes to the harsh sharia laws. Those who break them are severely punished.
Almost everybody, that is.
Apart from a handful of restaurants that sell beer on the sly at $6 a glass, the Thursday night Khartoum Pickwick Club at the British Embassy is the only regular recreational outlet serving the swelling ranks of the international community. Tougher to get into than the trendiest clubs in New York and London, aid workers, journalists, and businessmen scramble to find a way onto the guest list. Once in, revelers rush to the bar to purchase $20 drink cards bearing an advertisement from Shell Oil Co., “Go Well … Go Shell.” Some of Khartoum’s wealthiest, who have been known to throw lavish alcohol-soaked parties themselves, attend on occasion, happily mingling with the foreign intruders.
The Pickwick is a welcome stress reliever for folks living and working in Khartoum. Although entry into Darfur has been easier to attain since U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited in early July, journalists and aid workers have often been trapped in Khartoum, waiting endlessly for the government to dole out the necessary travel and work papers that will allow them into the region. Sudan uses permits as a means of government control and perhaps a useful tool in frustrating the visitors to the point of giving up. Permits to take photographs. Permits to travel to Darfur’s capital cities. Permits to then travel outside to the camps where traumatized families who’ve been “cleansed” from their villages by war are surviving on handouts from aid agencies. The government has control and doesn’t want you to forget it.
In between trips to Darfur, I made plans to visit one of four official displaced persons camps in and around Khartoum—called El Salaam in Arabic or “Peace Camp”—where 120,000 people uprooted from the south have been living since 1993. Of course, I first had to get a permit, though the camp is located just a stone’s throw from the capital in the historic city of Omdurman, whose religious ruler, the Mahdi, was toppled by the Anglo-Egyptian army led by Lord Kitchener in 1898. A couple of days later, permit in hand, I ventured out get a glimpse of El Salaam.
Despite its name, there is nothing peaceful about the camp. It has been nicknamed Jaborona, which, roughly translated, means “to force someone to do something against his will.” Over the past year and a half, the Sudanese government has bulldozed all structures there—including homes, schools, clinics, and latrines—leaving a muddy trail of disease and misery in its wake. As journalists wait in Khartoum to travel to Darfur, another disaster has been unfolding, virtually unnoticed by the outside world.
The government says it has flattened El Salaam, along with neighboring Wad al-Bashir Camp, to improve the area. The government offered to sell residents plots of land on which they could rebuild homes, which would then receive electricity, water, and other services. However, the bureaucracy is so prohibitive (for example birth certificates must be provided and many of the displaced fled their burning villages with nothing but the clothes on their backs) and the plots so expensive for the dirt poor residents, the end result has been the emergence of new shantytowns. Although a handful of residents have been able to purchase plots and build new homes, promised services are nowhere in sight.
“We are here in a shantytown now, my dear sister, we can’t even say we’re in a camp,” a woman called Paula told me as she pointed to the piece of land where her home once stood. “This is not a place for human beings, maybe for goats and rats.”
Some aid workers believe it is an indirect way of “cleansing” the area of the displaced people, who are left with no choice but to make a treacherous journey back to the south. A U.S.-supported peace agreement, calling for a power-sharing government with the SPLM/A is expected to be resolved in the next couple of months.
Around the time I met Paula, Khartoum’s grand theater was preparing a masterful performance. On Friday, Sept. 24, a few colleagues who were at work in the U.N. compound on the day of Muslim rest and I, received urgent phone calls from security personnel telling us not to move. Military checks had been thrown up on the main roads in town and everyone was being stopped and searched. Soon after, our cell phones began ringing in unison, and we were advised to return home immediately lest we be forced to spend the night in the offices without food or beds. U.N. security couldn’t tell us anything more since our phones might be monitored by the government.
We congregated in a colleague’s apartment for the evening as a fierce haboob descended on the city, still with no explanation about what was going on. I called a journalist friend who told me the government was claiming a coup attempt had been foiled and that after a massive security sweep through town, several “plotters” had been arrested. The government alleged that supporters of Hassan al-Turabi, the former speaker of the National Assembly who is now in prison—and who has a strong support base in Darfur—had been planning act of sabotage
SPLM/A leader John Garang, who is familiar with Khartoum’s tactics, called the event a fabricated distraction from international pressure imposed on the government to resolve the crisis in Darfur. In the days that followed, no proof of a plot was ever provided, and the “saboteurs” are now awaiting trial. During the two months I was in Sudan, the government made several statements in an effort to deflect international focus from its actions in Darfur, spinning itself as a victim under attack by the West and Turabi’s supporters alike.
In the final days before my departure from Sudan, I thought I might visit a couple of Khartoum tourist attractions. My camera hanging around my neck and my photo permit tucked in my pocket, a male friend and I hailed a taxi and headed to Omdurman, to see the famous Sufi whirling dervishes. Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam, can be seen witnessed in full trancelike force every Friday at dusk at the tomb of Sudans’s former religious ruler, the Mahdi. Men dressed in green and white robes dance and twirl in a hypnotic trance accompanied by a small group of percussionists. As the sky turned pink and the minarets glowed in the background, I began to shoot away. But not for long. Out of nowhere, several individuals appeared and began shouting at me, dragging us over to a dark room near the tomb.
“I have a permit, a government permit, I can take photographs!” I shouted, refusing to back down. They looked at it and began barking in Arabic. One particularly irascible man cloaked in green violently thrust his finger in my friend’s chest and threw my permit to the ground. I picked it up, and a large crowd soon formed. A number of worshippers who spoke some English tried explaining to the aggressors that I was permitted to take photographs and eventually sent the men away, apologizing to me for the disturbance, saying these were “bad men.”
I took a few more shots but was soon pursued by the visibly hostile “bad men” once again, and I finally gave up and left.
On the night of my departure from Sudan, with my bags packed and my nerves frayed, I attended one last debriefing with the U.N. humanitarian coordinator. As our meeting wound down, gunshots rang out in the air close by and a convoy of siren-wailing vehicles raced toward the airport. We called our security chief and were told to sit tight. Thankfully, we later got the all-clear sign, and I made it out of Sudan on the 3:45 a.m. flight to Nairobi, Kenya.
Sudan and Darfur are still in the headlines. Despite two U.N. Security Council resolutions threatening sanctions if Khartoum does not rein in the violence and abide by an April cease-fire agreement, the war rages on in Darfur. On Nov. 9, rebels and the government signed two deals in Abuja, Nigeria, covering security and humanitarian aid access. Nevertheless, I have received e-mails from former colleagues in Khartoum voicing concern about an overall deterioration on both fronts. Early this month, the Sudanese military surrounded several displaced persons camps, and aid agencies have been left with no choice but to evacuate. The United Nations says that a total of around 160,000 desperate people are currently cut off from life-saving aid due to the escalated violence, attacks on civilians, and acts of banditry.
In Khartoum, the rivers continue to flow.
