/ 4 April 1997

‘Apartheid’ in the Sowetos of Sudan

Phillip van Niekerk visited the refugee camps of Khartoum, capital of Sudan, and found ethnic rifts to rival the old South Africa

THERE is a jarring familiarity to the way the Sudanese refer to “them” – the tall, dark strangers now found in abundance in their northern cities. Any discussion with an Arab about independence for southern Sudan is not complete without the confidential explanation that, left to themselves, the Africans would wipe each other out in tribal war.

Even Dr Hassan al-Tourabi, minence grise of the Sudanese government, dubbed the Ayatollah of the Sudan by American newspapers, lets his guard down when he explains why he would not like the south to secede. Gazing out at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles from his spacious parliamentary offices, Tourabi says: “We don’t want them to fall in the vice of tribal warfare. They are not one tribe. And now they are fighting. It’s very bloody … It is true of the whole of Africa.”

It spoils the careful speech he has just delivered to reassure me that nothing like apartheid exists in the Sudan. “People think Arabs are persecuting Africans,” says Tourabi, speculating aloud why the new South Africa has kept his government at arm’s length. “They think we are fair- skinned like the Saudi Arabians or the Egyptians” — an allusion to the dark complexions of the Sudanese Arabs – “but we don’t believe in colour here.”

Tourabi is a silver-tongued old fox. His Islamic revolution is more a product of student activism at Leeds Polytechnic and London University in the Sixties than of the Mahdi Mohammedans, who frightened the wits out of late-Victorian England, waving General Gordon’s head on a stick. Tourabi’s Muslim Brotherhood represents an elite of educated young men who have secured the most important civil service and military jobs, but are struggling to take the rest of society with them.

Amid the dust and chaotic traffic of Khartoum, where even the ubiquitous goats are unable to eliminate the plastic garbage and men in turbans ride donkeys against a backdrop of Pepsi billboards, it is evident that the Islamist revolution has failed to deliver. According to the United Nations, half of all Sudanese lived below the poverty line 10 years ago; that figure has risen to more than 80%.

Any street-side pundit will tell you that the economy is being dragged down by the war in the south.

Southern Sudan belongs to the Great Lakes region. But the country was tacked on to Egypt, a Middle Eastern country, in the 19th century, first as a reservoir for slaves and then to secure Egyptian control of the Nile’s headwaters. The rights of the southern Sudanese have been ignored and trampled on by the Ottomans, the Egyptians, the Mahdists, the British and, since 1956, the successive regimes in Khartoum.

Except for a window of peace between 1972 and 1985, the south has been in rebellion since the British colonial administration hastily departed in 1956, leaving a country united under one flag, but politically, ethnically and religiously at odds. It is the longest-running war in the world.

Since January it has escalated dramatically. The rebels of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) have opened up a 480km front in the east, launching fresh assaults from Eritrea and Ethiopia. An even more threatening offensive from Uganda has resulted in rebels capturing a string of major towns and marching on the southern capital of Juba. The United States, keen to harass what it labels a “terrorist” Islamic fundamentalist state with close ties to Iran, is pouring aid into the rebel armies via Eritrea and Uganda.

The war in Sudan goes to the heart of the conflict that is ripping Africa apart. It has been overshadowed by the collapse of Zaire, but it is an integral part of a conflagration that could end with the redrawing of the continental map.

Sudanese support for the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Christian fundamentalist group that is waging a secessionist war in northern Uganda, has drawn Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni into the Sudanese conflict. By supporting the SPLA in southern Sudan and Laurent Kabila’s rebels in eastern Zaire, he has created a buffer zone around his country. He has also launched the creation of what could be a wider union in central Africa.

Refugees are pouring into Khartoum, religious and cultural strangers who are undermining the dream of an Islamic state. Up to a million-and-a-half displaced people have come to the city in the past eight years. Most of them have been moved out into camps on the harsh monochrome sand of the desert.

Here, where you would expect to see at most a camel or a palm tree, a vision of cane, hessian and bamboo frames shimmers like a mirage – a city of 300 000 scarecrow people. It is a human dumping ground, without a blade of grass for a goat, placed by the city government next to the Khartoum sewage dump, where human turds lie heaped on the desert sand.

Rita X is cooking a large pot of beans inside the camp. She helps distribute food relief to starving children inside a flimsy bamboo shack covered with Unicef sacks. Six years ago she fled with her husband and family to escape the fighting around Malacal, further up the Nile.

“Arabs harass you in the street,” says Rita. “They say you are pagans, kaffirs.” Is it because of your religion? I ask. “No,” she replies, without hesitation. “The first problem is our colour.”

Celia Y, a 23-year-old beauty who fled the area around Juba, says: “Even on the buses, if there is an Arab, you have to give him a seat.”

The people of the south name their camps Soweto and Mandela, making clear their identification with the victims of apartheid in South Africa. Many had built brick homes in neighbourhoods of Omdurman, an inner-city area on the east bank of the Nile. But their homes and schools were bulldozed. Entire neighbourhoods were razed at a few days’ notice.

Rita X and her husband had built a house in Omdurman, close to the market in the city centre. Her story reads like a Black Sash affidavit from the Seventies. She says: “One Tuesday the government came and told us we are not the people for these houses. We are not Arabs. They said we must be gone by Saturday when they would come and pull the house down. Everyone had to take their roofs along. Some tried to protest, but the soldiers opened fire, killing nine people. After the first protestors were gunned down, people realised that resistance was futile and started taking down their shacks. The government vehicles took us and dumped us in the desert.”

Some southerners cling tenaciously to their old neighbourhoods in the city, living in mud huts among their demolished houses. Others have been driven to the margins, residing in the stench of the Omdurman garbage dump. “They would rather live on a dump than face the uncertainty of the desert,” says Father Paul Boyle, a young Scottish Catholic priest who ran a school in a neighbourhood that was demolished a year ago.

The big desert camp outside Omdurman is called Dar El Salaam (Peace). The second camp, even more flimsy and further into the desert, has been renamed by its “displaced” residents As-Alaam (They Forced Us).

There are no roads, taxi ranks or clinics. Donkey carts carry cylindrical canisters, selling precious water brought up from wells.

Donor fatigue set in long ago. The aid agencies bring water, medical care and a little food to the camps, but there are chronic shortages of food. Only the Catholic Church appears to have increased its presence. It has 60 foreign priests in Khartoum, the footsoldiers of a new holy war. The priests relish the irony that a government which sought to Islamise the people of the south is facing a challenge in its own front yard.

“All the young people are coming to the churches,” says Boyle. “Southerners fleeing the war are converting to Christianity in Khartoum, bringing Christianity to the north.”

“It has become a socially acceptable way of opposing the government,” says another aid worker. “The church is a link with a larger, more powerful world.”

Tourabi is hard-pressed to explain how Islamist rule has improved life even for his own people. He brags that Sudan is sitting on “lakes of oil”, but his regime is increasingly isolated and economically strangled by US-led sanctions.

Sudan’s great experiment in Islamism is in fact relatively progressive. In contrast to their avowed enemies, the Saudis, Sudanese women have been promoted into major positions in society. US claims that Sudan is training terrorist groups appear grossly exaggerated. Sharia law is on the books, but it is limited to occasional public flogging and does not go to the extremes of limb amputation. The failure of strict Islamic law can be seen in the number of prostitutes on street corners at night.

But the most profound failure is within Muslim society itself. Abdel Wahad A-El Mubarak, an Islamic scholar and former minister of education, says Tourabi’s political Islam misconceives the nature of the religion in the Sudan, where Sufis predominate. “It is a very individualist religion. We would rather educate the people to become good Muslims,” he says. “The government is just using Islam as a political slogan to influence the masses.”

But the masses are not enthused. After the attacks of January 12, there was a lukewarm response to the government’s jihad theatre, where imams in camouflage uniforms with AK- 47s and webbing exhorted the masses to rise against Jews, foreigners and infidels. “If it was a proper jihad, all the sects would have come up and supported it,” says Mubarak. “But no. All the big sheikhs are keeping silent. Silence has great power.”

The escalation in fighting has brought renewed hope that the deadlock might be broken. The SPLA, under John Garang, has formed an alliance with former prime minister Sadek al-Mahdi, Tourabi’s brother- in-law and hereditary leader of one-third of Sudan’s Muslims. If victorious, Mahdi would grant southern Sudan the right to choose independence.

Khartoum, in separate talks with a breakaway group of rebels, has also accepted the right of the south to hold a plebiscite to determine whether it would like to be independent.

“In terms of that agreement, we have accepted the south can secede if they choose,” says Tourabi. “If two people are married, it is up to them to stay or to separate.”

But the war is far from over. The SPLA, heartened by the support from the US and Museveni, is not about to trust the word of Khartoum. And the vexed question of who would own the petroleum in south-central Sudan has not even been broached.

Rita X believes there can be no reconciliation between north and south Sudan: “If unity is what God wants, then maybe that is OK, but we don’t think it is what he wants.” She wants to go home to the green savannah when this is all over.

“This is a big breakthrough,” says the white-haired Abel Alier, a veteran southern politician who believes there is no doubt that the south, provoked by the narrow- mindedness of the Islamist government, will opt to secede. For many years the rebels had fought to democratise all of Sudan. But now Alier shakes his head as he gazes out of his dingy law offices at the street below: “They made a mistake, trying to make us into Muslims and Arabs.”

ENDS