Bashir and Kiir: brothers into twins

Khartoum received President Kiir of South Sudan with great relief. Even Tayeb Mustafa’s al-Intibaha offered the important visitor a welcome note, but made sure its readers received a florid interpretation of President Kiir’s salutary bow before the Sudanese flag in Khartoum airport. The more imaginative said a few tears came down his bearded cheek. President Bashir dropped his threat to block South Sudan’s oil exports through Sudan and President Kiir promised to halt all support to rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement in North Sudan (SPLA/M-N) and their allies in the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) including sealing the border to the movement of insurgents. The two presidents effectively avoided discussion of the dispute over Abyei, weary of the Abyei constituencies in their orbit. President Kiir said his government backs the African Union (AU) proposal to hold the Abyei referendum next October while President Bashir affirmed that establishment of the agreed on civilian institutions in Abyei must precede the referendum. The routine positions drew criticism from leaders of both the Ngok Dinka and the Misseriya. That said, the two presidents appeared ready to freeze the situation in Abyei as long as the terms of their tenuous trade-off, continued flow of South Sudan oil in return for South Sudan’s commitment to suppress the activities of the SPLA/M-N along the border, were adhered to. 

The current thaw of relations between Sudan and South Sudan is also partially a result of the altered domestic political environment in both countries. President Kiir suspended the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) Secretary General and chief negotiator with Sudan, Pagan Amum, arguably the SPLA/M-N’s greatest friend in South Sudan, and put him under investigation, and dismissed his minister Deng Alor, the prominent Ngok Dinka politician, on allegations of corruption. In Sudan, appetite for confrontation with South Sudan has become hard to sustain, even with the continued propaganda of al-Intibaha, considering the economic hardships facing the country as a consequence of the loss of oil revenues, and the resistance of business to the government ban on the lucrative cross-border trade with South Sudan. At a grander scale, a delegation of Sudanese businessmen joining the tycoons Usama Dawood Abdul Latif and Jamal al-Wali recently visited Juba to meet President Kiir, and the sidelines of the summit witnessed the signing of a cooperation protocol between Sudan’s employers’ union and the commerce and labor chamber in South Sudan. The two announced the formation of a joint council and plans for a joint investment bank. 

Whether the current improvements in relations between the two Sudans will continue is contingent primarily on the domestic situation in the two countries, namely President Kiir’s ability to centralize power and guard it, and President Bashir’s ability to quell opposition to his continued rule from outside the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and dissent within it without the need for the shield of a foreign belligerent. The President held a meeting with the National Umma Party (NUP) chief Sadiq al-Mahdi as part of a public relations campaign to popularize the proposal of a national reconciliation, and the press continued to speculate about possible candidates for the new cabinet, from the opposition parties and also the ‘reform’ protagonists in the NCP, including the former National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) boss Salah Gosh. 

Reflecting the changing winds from Juba, the SPLA/M-N declared a month long unilateral ceasefire in solidarity with the victims of the recent heavy rains and floods in the country. The Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) dismissed the declaration as a political gesture addressed to the international community but individual lawmakers in Khartoum welcomed it. Significantly, the government and the SPLA/M-N announced their readiness to allow the stalled polio vaccination campaign in rebel-held areas in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile to proceed in October. Details of the temporary ceasefire and the delivery of the vaccines are yet to be agreed upon. The government of South Kordofan offered opposition parties half the positions in the new state cabinet, and declared willingness to re-employs members of the SPLA/M-N dismissed from government service on outbreak of the insurgency in 2011. Judging by the precedent of its dealings with Chad in containing the operations of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in Darfur, Khartoum will probably be inclined to intensify its military campaign against the SPLA/M-N while seeking political accommodation with leaders of the Nuba in South Kordofan, a strategy it has been actively. The As the SPLA/M-N’s Yasir Arman spoke of truce, the National Assembly in Khartoum urged leaders of the Popular Defense Forces (PDF) to scale up their recruitment efforts to assist the SAF ahead of the new fighting season. NCP politicians said one other season and it’s all over. Well, President Bashir said the same in 2004 as the war in Darfur was just warming up; the officially dated mayhem in Darfur turned ten this year. Khartoum’s calculations are clear to read, but it is the response of the SPLA/M-N to the shifting coordinates around it that will determine the future course of the conflict that now threatens to ‘Darfurise’ the New Sudan. 

نافع: عامل تخاف، الله ما تخاف

عرضت وزيرة تنمية الموارد البشرية والعمل، اشراقة سيد محمود، على الرأي العام في مؤتمر صحفى الثلاثاء الماضي أرقاما من نتائج مسح قامت به الوزارة بالتعاون مع منظمة العمل الدولية والجهاز المركزي للإحصاء لسوق العمل السوداني. قالت الوزيرة أن حجم القوى العاملة ارتفع إلى 9.3 مليون عامل بالمقارنة مع 5.3 مليون في 1990، كما زادت نسبة البطالة إلى 18.8% مقارنة بنسبة 16.4% في 1990. من حيث التوزيع، قالت الوزيرة أن 53% من قوى العمل خارج القطاع الحكومي، وفصلت أن نسبة القوى العاملة في القطاع الزراعي انخفصت إلى 47% مقارنة بنسبة 60% عام 1990، لكن ليس لصالح التشغيل في القطاع الصناعي وإنما لقطاعي التجارة والخدمات. أضافت الوزيرة أن مؤهلات القوى العاملة التعليمية ارتفعت إلى نسبة 8.8% من 5%، ونسبت ذلك للتوسع في التعليم العالي مع تدني التعليم الفني والمهني رغم توجيهات الدولة بعكس ذلك. انتهى بذلك ما نقلت سونا من مؤتمر الوزيرة الصحفي التي أعلنت أن نتائج هذا المسح سيتم الإعلان عنها في ندوة لمنظمة العمل الدولية تستضيفها الخرطوم في 21 سبتمبر القادم، وذلك ضمن تقرير أوسع عن سوق العمل العربي.

غالب أرقام الوزيرة، كما هو ظاهر، معلقة في الهواء، لا يدرك متلقيها من أي مقام جاءت كسورها ، لذا لا مجال لتجميرها الساعة حتى تكشف الوزارة عن متن التقرير في سبتمبر القريب. من هذه "الضواقة" الاحصائية نأخذ بشاهدين على بعض التحولات الطارئة على الطبقة العاملة السودانية، توسعها الكمي وفك ارتباطها بجهاز الدولة إذا جازت العبارة، ما كان نتيجة لسياسات الخصخصة أو للتوسع في قطاع الخدمات. يتبع ذلك تشتيت قوى العمل في الإنتاج الصغير وما يعرف مجازا بالقطاع غير الرسمي أو القطاع الهامشي. تحاشت الوزيرة هذه التسميات لكن ألمحت إليها بقولها أن ما خسرت الزراعة من قوى العمل نزحت إلى التجارة والخدمات، وهو عرض لتدهور الاقتصاد الريفي بأي وجه فسرته. يكفي أن ملاك زراعيين في القضارف وشمال كردفان حذروا العام الماضي ومرة أخرى هذا العام من النقص الشديد في العمالة الزراعية، وعللوا ذلك بفقدان القوى العاملة من جنوب السودان بسبب استقلال الجنوب وتبعاته الحربية ثم حمى الذهب التي سحبت حتى رجال البوليس والجيش.

تلازم توسع الطبقة العاملة مع انتشارها الجغرافي والقطاعي، ولذلك تبعات تستوجب التقصي لمن أراد التوسل إليها بالتنظيم والتعبئة. قارن ذلك بالموقع المركزي الذي كانت تتمتع به عطبرة السكة حديد في خارطة العمل، حشدت كما حاسما من العمال المهرة يشتركون في المخدم والمحل. تضاعفت منذها أعداد العمال المهرة، لكنهم على خلاف السلف العطبرواي موزعون على مجالات إنتاج عدة ومخدمين أكثر، صلتهم الترحيل إن تيسر، لا سكن يضمهم ولا نادي. فوق ذلك انفك القيد القانوني على علاقات العمل، وأصبح حل للمخدمين التشغيل الكيري والموسمي والمؤقت كما يشتهون. خاف نافع علي نافع من "تخريب" يساري لنقابات غندور وحذر وأنذر، يستشعر ساعة تأتيه من حيث لا يحتسب، 9.3 مليون يا كابتن.  

A house of mud: Sudanese reads of Egypt

When Adly Mansour was installed interim president of Egypt by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the de factor ruler of the country, President Bashir eschewed the courtesy of congratulating his official counterpart down the Nile. The dramatic ouster of President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian military set off sirens in Khartoum, dulled only by the heavy rains and flash floods that more or less dissolved the common mud houses of the nas (commoners) in the capital and at no cost washed the dust off the concrete villas of the fortunate few. As the Egyptian security forces were busy killing hold-out supporters of Morsi in Cairo’s squares, Sisi’s soldiers airlifted humanitarian aid to the ‘people’ of Sudan. For some of Sudan’s star ‘democrats’, the gesture was the ornament needed to declare Sisi the type of benevolent strongman the country needs, a ‘nationalist’ officer capable of crushing the Islamist menace in an afternoon or two of tyranny. One particularly enthusiastic commentator crowned el-Sisi “the most important leader in the Middle East, past and future,” “a man with grand charisma”, whom history will grant “a degree above Gamal Abdel Nasser, and even above Ramses I.”

The mouthpiece of Tayeb Mustafa’s Just Peace Forum (JPF), al-Intibaha, published an assortment of pictures from the massacre in Rabaa al-Adawiya on 14 August, Mohamed Beltagy’s daughter smiling and then a lifeless face, the brain of a protestor in the hands of another, the rows of corpses in the mosque waiting in eternity for Morsi to return. On Friday 16 August, members of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the opposition Popular Congress Party (PCP), the two wings of the parent Islamic Movement in Sudan, joined each other in a rally to protest the bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Officially, the Sudanese government maintained the ‘Chinese’ line that what is happening in Egypt is an internal affair for Egyptians to sort out. The NCP members who were chanting in Khartoum against el-Sisi’s coup did so under the banner of the NCP-subservient Islamic Movement, a nuance supposed to free the ruling party from the obligation of taking a definitive position on the issue and yet satisfy the imperative of solidarity with the Egyptian brothers. Zubeir Ahmed al-Hassan, the secretary general of the NCP’s Islamic Movement, and Ibrahim al-Sanosi, a veteran Islamist and Turabi’s deputy in the PCP, addressed the Friday rally, permitted to park next to the Republican Palace as only a democracy would allow. The two men appealed for reconciliation between the two wings of the Islamic Movement to face the challenge of the secular threat, the Sisi in the dark. 

“To my brother and sheikh Ibrahim al-Sanosi, what happened in Egypt pushes us towards unity. We should overcome our differences. The Islam that has survived imprisonment and attained power through democracy is the answer”, said al-Zubeir Ahmed al-Hassan referring to the election victories of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). To this flirt Ibrahim responded: “It is time to unite the Muslims to face the secularist threat from the [Atlantic] Ocean to the [Arab] Gulf, the forces that conspire against our brothers in Egypt. When they finish them off they will come to Sudan.” “The battle goes on as long as there is good and evil,” added Sanosi the sheikh. Sisi betrayed Allah and betrayed Morsi, who promoted him and made him his minister, he said, inviting the comparison with President Bashir, whom the PCP accuses of betraying Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamic project, and Allah for that matter. The emotions of Islamic unity were immediately traded in the political market. Press reports repeated over the next week claims of an impending reconciliation between the NCP and the PCP starting with a “love you too” meeting between President Bashir and his former sheikh Hassan al-Turabi. NCP officials welcomed the idea and commentators shot in all directions, speculating whether the PCP’s Ali al-Haj, settled in Germany, would replace Ali Osman Mohamed Taha as first vice president, or whether the ‘Saihoon’ princelings, the noisy reform protagonists in the NCP, would be invited to inherit the state. After all, the ‘Saihoon’ can boast a triad with government experience, Wad Ibrahim the army officer, Salah Gosh the security chief and Ghazi Salah al-Din al-Atabani the intellectual statesman. 

To many a secular-minded opponent of the NCP, Egypt between 30 June and 14 August offered the fulfilment of dreams long nursed, a popular uprising against Islamist rule, the army stepping in to side with the ‘people’ and clear the ground for real democracy, and a ruthless security operation that pins proponents of political Islam for what they really are, ‘terrorists’. Many were reading from the chapter of Sudan’s April 1985 uprising against Jaafar Nimayri, and were thus ready to cheer el-Sisi as Egypt’s Siwar al-Dahab. The revered general was Chief of Staff and then General Commander of the  Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) during Nimayri’s last year in power. He and senior officers of the army declared Nimayri history on 6 April 1985 after a fortnight of protests in Khartoum and other major towns calling for the overthrow of the absent autocrat, occupied at the time in the US. Siwar al-Dahab, as the most senior army officer, assumed leadership of the Transitional Military Council, to steer a one year interim period and eventually handed over power to the elected parliamentary government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. Siwar al-Dahab, it must be added, is no stranger to Islamist politics. Once out of office he was named Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Islamic Call Organization, the charity arm of the Islamic Movement, which according to urban myth hosted the recording of President Bashir’s 30 June 1989 coup declaration. For the sake of detail, Nimayri had dismissed Siwar al-Dahab from the SAF in 1972, and he landed in Qatar where he served as military advisor of its Emir at the time, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad, and actual commander of the army and police until his recall by Nimayri the repentant imam in the 1980s. 

Reduce the above to pairs of Maoist abstractions and the result is two contradictions, one between secular and Islamist rule and another between military and civilian rule, argument being over which contradiction is the principal. The abstractions, compelling as they might be, miss if not mystify the dirty third, the contradiction between the mud houses on the floodplains, washed away, and the imposing villas, washed clean by Khartoum’s rains. Pit latrines collapsing around him, more the fifty thousand in the official count, the commissioner of Khartoum ordered a ban on building with mud bricks.

الثورة المصرية: سياسة حتى الموت

لن يستر التحليل مهما توسع وتعمق الهمجية التي بها حصد جهاز الدولة المصرية أرواح المعتصمين في رابعة العدوية والنهضة وقد انتشرت جثثهم بين الميدان والمسجد، دامية أو محترقة، ثم في رمسيس الجمعة، تنتظر في الأبدية عودة مرسي المعزول. كتب روبرت فيسك، مراسل جريدة الاندبندنت المخضرم في الشرق الأوسط، كلمة قبل أسبوعين أو يزيد سجل فيها التناقض بين الليبراليين المصريين أبناء المدينة الذين آثروا حصن الجيش المصري على المواجهة السياسية مع حركة الأخوان المسلمين في الحكم وبين المهاجرين من الريف المصري إلى رابعة العدوية بالعيال وأمهاتهم نصرا للأخوان و"الشرعية"، وهو تناقض قائم كذلك بين قيادة الأخوان كثيرة المال قليلة الصلاة وأنصارهم من غمار الأتقياء. الشاذ أن القوى الليبرالية التي نهضت لتفويض السيسي حتى يخلصهم من الأخوان بالقوة الضاربة أغمضوا أعينهم عن هؤلاء، يرون في كل مناصر للرئيس المعزول ريان أو شاطر يحمل السلاح، استسهلوا أبلسة الأخوان وأحلوا دمهم جماعة، بلا حقوق انسان بلا لمة.

سألت جريدة نيويورك تايمز زمرة من الأكاديميين والمراقبين عن تفسيرهم للعنف المفرط الذي واجه به جهاز الدولة المعتصمين رغم وعد حكومي بالتدرج في إخلاء الميدانين فأفاد بعضهم أن غرض غزوة الأربعاء كان دفع الأخوان بشدة المغصة خارج السياسة إلى هامش الإرهاب فيما يشبه أحداث الجزائر عام 1991 حينما تدخل الجيش لكبت الإسلاميين بعد أن فازت الجبهة الإسلامية للإنقاذ بالجولة الأولى من الانتخابات. بغياب قيادتها السياسية في السجون انفرط عقد الجبهة وأخذت مكانها جماعات مسلحة ظلت تحارب الدولة والجبهة ذاتها وقت استعد بعض قادتها للتفاوض مع الجيش. قال اسكندر العمراني للتايمز أن أعضاء النادي السياسي وجدوا  في اتفاق المؤسستين العسكرية والأمنية على قهر الأخوان فرصة تاريخية لاستبعاد الجماعة من السياسة بالضربة القاضية حتى وإن كان الثمن القبول بعهد طويل من القمع السياسي تحت شعار فرض "هيبة الدولة" و"محاربة الإرهاب"، وهي لغة كان مرسي المعزول نفسه استلفها لمواجهة الحركة الجماهيرية ضد حكم الأخوان وقت اختار الفلولي محمد ابراهيم مصطفى وزيرا للداخلية في يناير 2013، ذات الوزير الذي يقوم الآن بفرض هيبة الدولة في مواجهة أنصار مرسي. حركة الأخوان من جهتها عدمت التدبير كل خطتها أن تحث أنصارها على "الشهادة" لا غير، تعطلت ساعتها يوم فاز مرسي بالرئاسة وسهت عن حقيقة أن شعبيته لم تزد على ربع عدد الأصوات في جولة الانتخابات الأولى. استغرب بيتر هسلر في مجلة نيويوركر هذه الغشامة من الأخوان المسلمين رغم تاريخهم الطويل في التنظيم وقال انقطعوا عن اتجاهات الشارع المصري واستعدوه حتى انقلب عليهم تحت ظل السيسي الأب.

لم أجد أحسن مقاومة لفتنة السيسي والأخوان من "الاشتراكيون الثوريون"، فصيل يساري قليل العدد لكن عظيم الهمة. أصدر الاشتراكيون ورقة بعنوان "يسقط حكم العسكر..لا لعودة الفلول..لا لعودة الأخوان" اجتهدوا فيها لعقل مسار الثورة والثورة المضادة في مصر وتطوير موقف أجدى سياسة من السرور بذبح الأخوان الجماعي والشماتة العاطلة. قال الاشتراكيون أن الجيش قطع الطريق على تطور الحركة الجماهيرية التي تصاعدت في 30 يونيو بالانقلاب في 3 يوليو تمهيدا لعودة الطبقة الحاكمة وقد نفضت عنها الأخوان، غطاء ذلك الدعائي تلبيس الأخوان في كافة جرائم العسكر والفلول والسعي لمحو 25 يناير واستبدالها بالتفويض. عف الاشتراكيون الانتهازية واستقبلوا العزلة المؤقتة بثقة الثوري في فتح قريب فمرحى لاستثنائهم المجيد. 

Sudan: the class war in the capital

Over the past few years the Sudanese press has dedicated more and more space to coverage of crime, reports that attract a greater readership than the seesaw of Juba-Khartoum relations and the bellicose politics of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and its opponents. In fact, the widest distributing paper in Sudan, al-Dar, is wholly dedicated to crime and scandal, feeding a steady stream of the bizarre, extreme and shocking to the gossip rounds of the nation, associated in the rule with the lengthy multi-event weddings and extended funerals that channel rather than interrupt daily life. 

Thanks to an ever increasing number of cars and internet-wired mobile phones, the more affluent middle-class inhabitants of Khartoum and other major towns of the Sudanese heartland converted the norms of the extended family into an urban art of socializing. Well informed about the calamities that befall their own families as well as those of colleagues, friends and acquaintances through the gifts of communications technology, they find themselves obliged to criss-cross the capital offering congratulations and condolences as the situation might require. The less committed of course might restrict these mujamalat (courtesies) to a phone call or a text message but drop them they cannot, to the extent that the distinctive marker of a middle-class Khartoum funeral is no more the anguished cries of bereaved relatives but the cacophony of ringtones and exhibit of parked cars, the more the higher the social value of the event. 

In addition to birth, wedding and death less cyclical misfortunes like a burglary or a car accident are also occasions for a mujamala, in this case prayers for kafara, i.e. consideration of the mishap as credit necessary to delete past sins from personal history. When suffering from his throat ailment late last year President Bashir invoked the kafara principle. He told a small group of supporters who assembled in the Sudanese embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after undergoing a medical procedure that his throat complaints were a kafara for whatever grievances his citizens might have against him. 

Sudan’s upper class proper, like their global counterparts, have the means to shield themselves and their property from the menaces of the less fortunate. In recent years, gated communities have mushroomed in Khartoum’s suburbia with private security firms taking over the responsibility for protection instead of the regular police, accused in popular perception of colluding with the very burglars they are supposed to nip and sharing in the booty of nocturnal house calls. With the withdrawal of the filthy rich from the city to their own sharia-free ‘liberated’ mini-worlds the immediate ramifications of class conflict play out orders of wealth lower, foremost in the crime-exposed neighbourhoods of the upper middle class still wholly dependent on state benevolence for security and services. 

As a boy growing up in Omdurman in the 1980s I remember vividly our neighbourhood burglar, a lone bachelor who despite his disrepute enjoyed the respect of children for being an adult and that of adults for adhering to a minimum degree of civility. Hasan spent his free time off burglary selling weed at discount prices to a small clientele of local craftsmen, shopkeepers and rebellious secondary school lads and running a one-man delivery service of ‘aragi’ (the famous Sudanese dates liquor) for respectable gentlemen who could not possibly risk buying the stuff themselves. A keen observer would spot Hasan in sneak mode gliding through the streets from this to that door during the early night hour when dependents were in trance watching the daily Egyptian series and the alpha males pretended to be waiting for the main news bulletin of the day but had their ears perked in expectation of his welcome drop-off. 

When business was down for any reason, or he just wanted to, Hasan would resort to stealing the bed sheets left hanging on washing lines by busy housewives, the random cassette player forgotten in the yard, and when lucky the odd piece of gold jewellery neglected by an anxious bride in the rush of matrimonial duty. In that regard, Hasan was more a scavenger than an active burglar. He did climb over walls, usually in the dark hour before dawn, but mostly only to pick whatever surplus of household items was on display. In return, Hasan had the duty to guard the neighbourhood against competing burglars, and in that he proved quite efficient, usually the first to shout harami (thief) whenever he spotted one during his regular rounds, and the most vicious in punishing trespassers of his domain. 

Almost every house in the neighbourhood lived partly off the dispatches of an expatriate son or daughter, cash of course as well as consumer products, electrical appliances, clothes, sugar, toothpaste, you name it. Hasan, like all neighbourhood residents, awaited the annual home vacations of these generous providers with great hope. Keen to avoid his intrusions, judged as particularly scary for children growing up in the safety and wellbeing of the Arab Gulf, the better off parents preferred to buy Hasan’s abstinence from the job with gifts, a new shirt or cloth for a new jellabiya was usually sufficient to secure his compliance. This precarious symbiosis was obviously not made to last. Trespassing gangs of thieves outcompeted Hasan as the capital received more and more impoverished migrants from Sudan’s devastated rural communities, drought stricken and war ravaged. He was soon accused of assisting the “strangers” through reconnaissance or the passage of crucial information on the in-country itinerary of vising expatriates. The new burglary model of which Hasan was charged featured ethnicity as a diagnostic cue of criminality. Being a Nuba, he was accused of siding with his kin in forcibly taxing dispatches from the Arab Gulf. 

Private property had by then acquired greater significance, partially as a result of the combined effect of the deterioration in living standards in the capital and the inflow of hard earned remittances from abroad. It was in Ramadan, the fasting month when believers are encouraged to share in the woes of the less fortunate by abstaining from food and drink from dawn to dusk, that the discrepancies between an emerging class of particularly pious nouveau riches and the sin-inclined majority were glaringly on display. Electricity generators and air conditioners turned Ramadan into a vacation of indulgence for the few while chronic power and water cuts kept the left behind permanently praying. Some envious evil-doers were even tempted to sabotage those beastly generators in order to silence their exhibitionist noise, torture pure that robbed the sinners destined to endure the glowing coals of Ramadan unmediated by modern devices of their only consolation, sleep.

The ideology of the remittance economy featured on one hand a jealous passion for private property and on the other confirmed faith in the infinite wisdom and superiority of sharia. Fidelity to sharia was perceived in this context as the reason behind a divine welfare scheme for the good Moslems of the Arab Gulf and its disregard as one definitive cause for Allah’s wrath towards the bad Moslems of Sudan. Echoes of the same notion are still operative today and can be discerned in the controversial statements of the one member of parliament who at least has something remarkable to say compared to the party-line parrots in the house, Dafalla Hasab al-Rasoul. The punitive sharia regime introduced by Nimayri in September 1983 functioned in part as a tool to safeguard the wealth of the nouveau riches from the extended hands of the rabble. The prompt justice courts manned by power-hungry sharia judges were welcomed as such by this powerful constituency at a time when the Sudanese judiciary was triple crippled, overwhelmed by the sheer number of criminal cases awaiting adjudication, depopulated by its Gordonian-trained staff of judges and prosecutors who found more attractive employment in the Arab Gulf and paralyzed by the intermittent strikes of those who held out. 

Today, even sharia seems incapable of disciplining Khartoum’s armed gangs, the professionals who have slipped out of the subversive civility of the likes of Hasan to join a global knighthood of adroit operators. Last year a troop of such men and women targeted the house of the NCP heavyweight Qutbi al-Mahdi, a Canadian citizen, and managed to get away with a cache of foreign currencies and gold. They security services eventually captured some of them but the trial proceedings proved a greater embarrassment for Qutbi than for the ‘criminals’ behind bars. I suppose Bertolt Brecht’s resonating indictment “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” would have served them well in court. “Hungry man, reach for the book, it is a weapon,” he also said. Hasan recently passed away in an Omdurman hospital. Farewell ya my friend.

#OurSudan: musings of the undead effendi

A group of technology-savvy, gender-sensitive and human-rights-mainstreamed Sudanese young women and men put together a twelve minutes film titled #OurSudan for the English-literate audience with Arabic subtitles. I recognized a few of the people who spoke to the camera as friends and university colleagues. The film is the brainchild and production of Tariq Hilal, a Khartoumian political scientist and democracy practitioner. It is essentially a replay of Hilal’s TEDx Khartoum lecture in May 2012 with a cast. Apparently a hygienic exercise in the marketing of ‘good will’ and ‘positive thinking’, the film is a demonstration of ideology at its purest with the gushing of politics flushed out leaving bare the white bone of fantasy. 

The knot of Tariq’s narrative is the apposition of two generations, the fathers who inherited the colony intact and their sons/daughters who suffered the postcolony as a site of fracture and degeneration. The first, he tells us, had it all, trains that ran on time, jazz nights by the Nile, Khartoum University in its prime when exams were marked in London and students had their laundry done, and the second had to queue for fuel and bread, fought for a foothold in crammed public buses and endured education in impoverished universities that offered nothing more than diplomas. The idealism that inspired the return of the fathers from higher education in Europe and North America to build the country they considered theirs was replaced by humble goals and a pragmatic worldview that kept most of their offspring abroad as ‘naturalised’ citizens or permanent immigrants in foreign lands. While the fathers could not realise their dreams the offspring had difficulties dreaming bogged down as they were by the perception of having “fallen short” tells us Tariq. The resolution he offers is belief. With the insight that the golden age of Sudan was not so golden and the dark age not so dark, Tariq’s advice is “to recognise that our generation is a generation to be proud of too.” Without the privileges of the golden age Sudan’s young men and women have achieved great things, Hilal assures us. The climax is reached with the suspicious and oft-repeated Sudan snippet, a resources rich geography where the Middle East meets Africa inhabited by peoples of diverse ethnicities, religions and colours, and endowed with a predominantly young population eager to learn and achieve. The cast of the film actually represented the flow of colour from the dark ‘akhdar’ through the hybrid ‘asmar’ to the light ‘asfar’ of the Sudanese. The endpoint is reached with a marketing repetition of the trademark ‘My Sudan…Your Sudan… Our Sudan’ on the background of the smiling faces of the troupe followed by the instruction: “It is time to dream a new dream, the dream of our generation.” 

Tariq’s narrative and its video transformation pursue the politics of representation with the candour and inanity of television advertisements. The two sexes are highlighted as are the shades of skin colour, the signifiers of religious observance or lack thereof and the physiognomic features of ethnic categorisation. Conspicuously absent from the photogenic mosaic display is any reference to the contradictions of social class, and rightly so since the dreams entertained, the failed old and the celebrated new, are born of a shared political economy, that of the homogenous few who “stand tall”, to plagiarise Tariq’s very words, above the crowd. Tariq did a great job describing the anguish of Sudan’s effendiya and their heirs, the salaried degrees-heavy professionals with global ties, at the loss of a world they occupied but did not make. He voiced the fantasy of return from Babylonian exile in the world to a Sudanese Jerusalem to be with a passion deserving of admiration, but fell prey to the very fiction he dismissed as reminisce. If there is a single thread that runs through the tumultuous history of postcolonial Sudan it is the continuous revolt of its peoples against the power structures that made the trains run on the time of the effendiya as it were. Whether under the banners of a militant left in the 1960s, with the spears of sharia in the 1980s and 1990s or in the bandwagons of ethnic kith and kin, Sudan’s disenfranchised continue to challenge the colonial architecture of power at the heart of its persistent crisis. All claims considered, Sudan belongs to those who put down the rails, did the students’ laundry and shouldered the costs of the London exams. Cinema Coliseum is playing their film, and there are no subtitles.

The Sudanese: between a rock and a hard place

The National Congress Party – Reform Platform (NCP-RP), a semi-clandestine association of disgruntled Islamists that developed as a carrier of the memoranda politics preceding the Islamic Movement’s November 2012 general conference and the political vehicle of the ensuing coup attempt of Brigadier-general Mohamed Ibrahim Abd al-Jalil (Wad Ibrahim) and fellow officers, issued on Saturday a statement declaring a mass revoke of allegiance to President Bashir. The NCP-RP author(s) used the Arabic word bai’a to define the relationship with President Bashir, a term from medieval Islamic jurisprudence that modern Islamic movements beginning with the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood under Hassan al-Banna have rehabilitated to refer to organisational subjugation and almost unconditional obedience to an all-knowing leader. 

The NCP-RP, dissident civilians of the ruling party and members of the military, announced a replacement pledge of allegiance to Wad Ibrahim arguing that President Bashir had failed to adhere to the conditions of the bai’a he enjoyed since 1989, namely the imposition of sharia and the rule of justice. Bashir failed to maintain the unity of the country’s territory as inherited from our forefathers and did not implement Allah’s sharia, said the statement. The blemish was not limited to President Bashir though. “Khartoum is today one of the most corrupt Arab and Moslem cities, and since its president is a dancer it is the habit of its inhabitants to dance”, added the statement paraphrasing a known Arab idiom. The Arabic word fasaad, translated here into corruption, carries strong connotations of sexual morality, and would better be translated into debauchery judging by the example of the dancing president and the idiom it refers to. In any case, the apparently sharia thirsty NCP reformers are obviously not impressed by the lifestyles of the new Khartoumians. 

The statement went on to deplore President Bashir’s tolerance of the financial corruption of his brothers and the nepotism of his ministers, referred to in the text as ‘racism’. The Minister of Oil Awad al-Jaz , said the reformers, manned the whole ministry with people from his ‘tribe’. The eclectic character of the NCP-RP’s criticism is noteworthy. From the Salafis they borrowed abhorrence towards the alleged promiscuity of the capital’s inhabitants, from the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) the algebra of ethnic power-sharing, from the opposition parties the secession blame and from their own ranks the envy of junior cadres towards scandalously rich seniors. The reformers pledged obedience to Wad Ibrahim in order to carry out the battle to change this government which they said ruled in their name as ‘mujahideen’ and army servicemen but reneged on its promise to apply Allah’s sharia. A sympathiser might argue that the sharia rhetoric of the NCP-RP is only tactical in nature intended to challenge the ‘religious’ legitimacy of President Bashir as Moslem ruler. What matters however is not so much the actual practice of sharia but rather its function in political discourse. In that regard, the NCP-RP is rehashing a theme that goes back to the 1960’s when the emergent Islamic Movement, shocked and attracted by Khartoum’s offerings of pleasure, harassed President Abboud’s government and the political class at large with accusations of loose sexual mores. The campaign of the Islamic Movement peaked following the overthrow of Abboud in 1964 with mounting pressure on parliamentarians to ban prostitution in the capital.

As if on campaign, Wad Ibrahim accompanied by the former head of the NCP’s parliamentary caucus Ghazi Salah al-Din al-Attabani and a crowd of ‘Saihoon’, have been touring the native towns and villages of the coup plot officers attending one celebration of their release after another. They recently landed in al-Zubeirat in Gezira. Wad Ibrahim, nursing his political self, declared commitment to the path of reform, and his fellow officer Fath al-Raheem asserted that they were partners in the ‘Salvation Revolution’ of President Bashir and not mere footmen. The cautious Ghazi reiterated the call for reform stressing that it was a lengthy process and not merely a campaign against a few corrupt individuals. Between Wad Ibrahim and Ghazi, I wonder who pledged allegiance to whom. The situation is certainly familiar. Osama Tawfiq, identified as a Saihoon leader, kept the channels patent with President Bashir unlike the authors of the NCP-RP declaration. The President, he said, refused the prosecution of the coup officers and immediately signed the order of their release once it was presented to him. “These are not the men to be tried,” Bashir reportedly said. 

As the NCP-RP loads reloads its sharia guns the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement in North Sudan (SPLA/M-N) and its allies in the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) are ravaging the countryside in South Kordofan and adjacent areas of North Kordofan with real gunfire, real enough to busy the medical corps of the demoralized Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) around the clock. Yasir Arman, the SPLA/M-N Secretary General, told US and Sudanese activists on Saturday that the SRF’s recent offensive was meant to convince the population yet unvisited by war that the government was sufficiently weak to be toppled through the combined military might of the SRF and the ‘revolutionary’ initiative of the political forces and civil society organisations that seek to overthrow the regime by peaceful means. Sudan is a failed state, said Arman, and a new “social contract that does not discriminate between the Sudanese” is necessary to reconstruct it, one that he proposed could be achieved if the ruling NCP agrees to negotiations with the SRF as a whole and not only the SPLA/M-N in order to end the wars in the country. In earlier statements, Arman instructed those who reject armed resistance to the NCP to escalate mass political action, rather than subdue to the ruling security-military complex. Arman’s message to the allegedly complacent heartland, rewritten, is simply rise up or endure the consequences of failing to do so. The reasoning is a Manichean one, either with us or with the enemy, mirroring rather than transcending the NCP’s mobilisation propaganda. 

The ‘change’ that has eluded the NCP-RP, officers and civilians, from within, the SRF is dashing to achieve by the reach of its guns from without. Between the disciplinary edge of the Islamist reformers’ renewed sharia passion and the gun-mediated secular social contract pledged by the SRF there is a uniting chain, coercion. The barricades are littered with the ethnically labelled corpses of the ‘Sudanese’.