A few images from a couple of demos going on in the city today.
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Protest
Documenting a year of the crisis, two slideshow look at what has happened, and what life is like for over a quarter of a million refugees
The artists had spent weeks on the babies. There were fifty of them, and they were finished in the early hours of this morning. Carved from blocks of polystyrene, papier mâché for skin, they were carried down towards “Freedom Corner” of Nairobi’s ...
Libya: A Precursor
I didn’t know it yet, but this would be my first taste of the Libyan revolution.
With such sensitivities around protests in Sudan, it was with a healthy dose of trepidation that I drove over to the Libyan embassy in Riyadh, Khartoum’s rich, eastern district. I had got word that some people would be demonstrating about the events unfolding in Libya, and was curious to see what would happen.
Arriving at the embassy, there was no-one but a few heavy-looking security officials at the door. This was not a good sign, and being a khawaja with a camera, one tends to stand out a lot in Khartoum at the best of times.
After more driving around, wondering if I would catch sight of a group marching Libyans, I returned to the embassy as a handful of Egyptians arrived, print-outs of slogans in Arabic taped to their chests. It was Egyptian tricolours that they held, not the green of Qaddafi’s flag.
Photographing them as they stood on the pavement opposite the embassy, one o the heavies crossed the road to come and speak to us. “This is it”, I thought. But he seemed relatively uninterested in my gear as I prepared to show my Press Pass from the ministry.
And then I was bundled into the back of a pick-up truck with some of the protestors. With my limited Arabic, and their limited English, I knew not where we were headed, and I questioned how I could explain my association with them if we were stopped by Khartoum’s heavy-handed police, en-route.
And then we arrived outside the main building of the Sudan Students’ Union and a large crowd had formed. I have never seen anything like this in Khartoum.
“Today this demonstration is called for by the Sudanese and Egyptians to support the Libyan people to help remove Qaddafi and his government.”
This, as one of the student leaders told me, was what those assembled were risking their freedom for. They wanted to demonstrate their belief that Qaddafi should not “kill Islamic people, the important thing for humans is freedom”. Freedom. An interesting concept for those living under the Khartoum regime.
“We are annoyed that he [Qaddafi] is using planes and helicopters to kill people” they told me, and that they are wish to show that “all the Arab nations are with the Libyan people and their struggle against Qaddafi”.
And then it all melted away. Students piled into mini-buses, cars drove away, flags hanging out of windows, and I was left in another empty street in Khartoum, with my camera, some photos and my freedom.
Petition for Prisoners
As governments seemed to be toppling throughout the Middle East, many of us wondered whether the unrest would spread to Khartoum.
Not that it would be easy to cover. The Sudanese youth had called for mass demonstrations in the country on January 30th, which were violently suppressed by the police and security services. Journalists trying to cover the protests were prevented from operating, and in some cases arrested. The Sudanese security apparatus do not like cameras.
It just didn’t seem to take off here. Despite the fifteen-thousand that joined the Facebook group “Youth for Change” that called for a day of action, only a fraction of those who supported it—or at least clicked “Like”—actually turned up. And I don’t believe that Sudan has the same desire for change as Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt, the Sudanese youth’s role-models.
From my time in the country last year around the time of the 2010 Sudanese elections, Omar al-Bashir and his ruling National Congress Party are popular. Unpopularity stems largely from rising food and fuel prices; he certainly isn’t the crony of the West that could be claimed by other Arab leaders.
The women depicted above, however, do have gall though. Their sons, their husbands, their brothers and uncles were imprisoned in the demonstrations that bubbled in Khartoum, and have spent the last two weeks imprisoned in the ghost-houses of the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS).
In the courtyard of the house of the leader of the national Umma party, these women manifested for their release. On the road opposite the house, two pick-up trucks full of plain-clothes security operatives sat, inconspicuously. At a nearby crossroads, other trucks full of baton-wielding, riot-shield clad police were posted on every corner.
As I slunk in through the door to join a handful of brave Sudanese journalists, and one other foreign correspondent, my heart was pounding.
A while later, the women left by the back door as we journalists left by the front. As we drove to the NISS building, where the women hoped to deliver a petition demanding their loved-ones’ release, a van full of riot-police flanked us.
Several of the women were stopped and arrested en-route, being driven around the city for several hours before being deposited in random parts of the city by security operatives. The chance of pulling out my camera in front of the NISS building was non-existent.
Sudan’s elections last year were heralded as the first democratic vote in the country since the eighties, but for those showing their discontent of the situation in the country, freedom of expression and demonstration is far from a reality.