An Open Letter to the President of Republic of Sudan

[Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Image from Wikimedia Commons] [Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Image from Wikimedia Commons]

An Open Letter to the President of Republic of Sudan

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following letter was originally published on Young Professionals in Human Rights on 30 June 2012.] 

Dear Mr. Omer Elbashier:

When you took over power, it was uncomfortable. When you fired skilled workers in civic service, it was unreasonable. When you introduced Sharia laws, it was painful. When your regime announced war against South Sudan, I feared for my family and friends.

But now, after 23 years under your governance, after 23 years of discriminating, forcing, abusing and killing, now it is personal.

Here I am in London watching the uprisings in Sudan exploding all around our country. People are fed up with seeking permission from your government just to survive. We were already struggling with your authoritarian system and restrictive laws, but the recent dramatic increase in the cost of living and fuel prices has pushed our country to the brink. We are angry and have reached the point of no return. Nothing is going to shut us up and we will not back down.

Following the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the Sudanese people are now speaking out and protesting in cities across the county including Khartoum, Eljazeera, Elobaied, Portsudan, Kasala and Gadarif. Women, children, students, workers and the whole nation are out in our streets at the moment. We are calling for change and for you and your regime to step down.

Don’t think that you can get away with arresting and torturing hundreds of thousands of our citizens, some of whom we might see after they have been tortured and others whom we might never hear of again. We have been watching in horror for the past 12 days. Sadly, here in London, I barely see any mention of the protests in the news, in TV or newspapers. It seems a few hundred dead and thousands arrested cannot compete with the death record of Syria or Afghanistan.

Don’t worry, Mr. President, we will soon have an “accepted” death record for the media to happily pay attention to!

Before today, I never took the crimes of your regime personally, although I have been subjected to discrimination as a woman, an atheist and an activist.  Four days ago, I was devastated when I got word that six of my university classmates were arrested. Five years ago at University of Khartoum, Amro Azhari, Fayiz Abdullah, Haj Ahmed, Kifah Osman, Fahad Mohamed and dear Mohamed Salah and I were friends. Now they are all arrested. No one knows where they are or what’s going to happen to them.

Now it is personal, Mr. Elbashir. It is very personal. And now is when you should be very worried because we have an entire country of individuals just like me who are taking this personally. It is not only my friends who are threatened by your regime: there are hundreds of our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins, and friends who must be let free.

I cannot imagine what it is like in your prisons or “Biut alashbah” (torturing/ghost houses).There are few people who have lived to tell their stories, but Wail Taha and Naglaa Sid-Ahmed’s stories are among the most recent and terrifying. Your regime’s crimes continue to pile up: the case of Safia Ishag caught many people’s attention as she was arrested and gang-raped by three of your policemen. Safia is now somewhere outside of the country after being threatened for pursuing her case.  Unfortunately, the situation may be repeating itself. Three days ago, two feminist and human rights activists (Kareema Fatih-Alrahman and Sarah Daif-Allah) were just arrested while protesting. Nothing is clear yet because your officers won’t allow visitors or give them access to lawyers. From what we have seen in similar situations, I would guess that the least they will be subjected to are sexual assaults and I won’t allow myself to imagine what could happen after.

Mr. Elbasir, what you have done to our country is deplorable. It breaks my heart to see this happening there. But if you look around you at the protests and the activity of my fellow citizens you will understand that these are more than angry, hungry, hopeless people causing problems in streets. We want our children to have access to education, women to gain rights equal to  men, rural areas to receive health care and everyone to have a room in Sudan. We want change, we want real change.

Finally, as a Sudanese, an activist and a human, I will join with my fellow citizens to use every available platform to push you out of power and change your regime. I call on every individual in the Sudanese diaspora in London and the world to act. I call on the international community to help and support the Sudanese nation to overthrow Mr. Elbashir’s authoritarian government and achieve civic and democratic change.

Mr. President, now it’s personal for the Sudanese people. Your regime’s time is coming to an end.

Nahla Mahmoud
London, UK

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412