By Ahmed Elzobier
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”.