Statement by MESA Board and Academic Freedom Committee on Sudan

Statement by MESA Board and Academic Freedom Committee on Sudan

Statement by MESA Board and Academic Freedom Committee on Sudan

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)
[The following letter was published by the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and its Committee on Academic Freedom on 27 February 2019, which strongly condemns the Sudanese government’s violent suppression of peaceful public protests since December 2018, and the arbitrary detention of protestors, including many academics.] 

Background


Protests against the policies of President Omar al-Bashir and his National Congress Party (NCP) first erupted in December 2018 in the city of Atbara, roughly 200 miles north of Khartoum, in response to drastic increases in the prices of bread and fuel.  Within a matter of days, the protests had spread to Khartoum and other cities and towns throughout the country.  At the same time, the focus of the protests shifted from grievances over prices of basic commodities to opposition to the alleged corruption of the NCP regime, which has ruled Sudan since 1989, and to President al-Bashir’s plans to amend the constitution to allow him to run for an unprecedented third term in 2020.
 
As the protests spread, the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA) took an active role in scheduling and organizing protests, particularly in Khartoum. Initially, the SPA’s priority was advocating for wage increases for public-sector workers.  But when government security forces responded to a peaceful march in Khartoum in late December 2018 with violence, the SPA shifted its demands to the removal of the NCP government and the transition over four years to a multi-party democracy.  The protests, now entering the fourth month, have spread throughout Sudan and among all classes of society.
 

Repression


The Sudanese government has responded to peaceful protests with violent repression.  National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) forces have fired live ammunition at street protestors, killing over fifty, according to some reports.  More insidiously, NISS “hit squads” have abducted targeted protesters, either on the street or from their homes, and transported them to secret detention and torture centers.  

The Role of Academics


Sudanese academics have taken a key role in these protests, not least by drawing the attention of international academic and humanitarian organizations to the Bashir government’s violent suppression of dissent.  On 6 January 2019, government authorities briefly arrested eight University of Khartoum faculty members in order to prevent them from leaving campus to participate in protests.  One hundred other faculty members who had fled to a campus building were prevented from leaving for three hours.  Undeterred, some 300 University of Khartoum faculty members, students, and staff held a peaceful sit-in on 30 January, denouncing the government’s violence against protesters and calling for democratic elections.  Fourteen faculty members were arrested as a result of their participation in this sit-in.  After a second sit-in on 12 February, seventeen additional faculty members were detained. 
 
Violent repression of academics has not been limited to the University of Khartoum. On 1 February 2019, a teacher in Kassala state in eastern Sudan was detained by NISS forces on charges of organizing a protest and died in custody. An investigation by the Sudanese prosecutor’s office concluded that the teacher had been tortured to death.  In Darfur state in western Sudan, protesting students were paraded in front of television cameras and forced to “confess” their ties to the rebel Sudanese Liberation Army.
 
On 19 February, the Sudanese government closed all institutions of higher education in the country, including thirty-eight public universities and roughly 100 private institutions.  While at least one university spokesperson has claimed that the closure is intended to alleviate students’ suffering during this period of upheaval, a SPA spokesman who is also a University of Khartoum faculty member insists that the closure is designed to prevent student participation in protests.  Quite apart from the issue of suppression of protests, the closure interrupts students’ educations and paths to productive employment.  The current closure could, by some estimates, result in the loss of a full academic year.  In addition, as a result of the closure, hundreds of students have been obliged to vacate their university housing.  Many lack alternative lodging options.

Media Suppression

 
Since late December 2018, over seventy Sudanese journalists have been arrested for covering the protests, while others have had their media credentials revoked. Among foreign correspondents, reporters from al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya have had their credentials revoked while scores of journalists from other news outlets have been expelled from Sudan. Sudanese newspapers have been forbidden to cover the protests.  Protests by the Sudanese Media Professionals organization have been prevented by the NISS.

State of Emergency


On 22 February 2019, President al-Bashir declared a one-year nationwide state of emergency, dissolving the national government and all regional governments.  He has called on Sudan’s parliament to delay the proposed constitutional amendment that would allow him to run for another term as president, and he has called on opposition groups to enter a political dialogue with the government.  
 
The SPA and other opposition groups have rejected President al-Bashir’s measures and called for further protests, and indeed, the number of protests appears to have increased.  The security forces are again responding violently, firing live ammunition and conducting house-to-house searches for activists.  The result of all these actions is tremendous uncertainty throughout Sudan, even as many protesters remain in prison and universities remain closed.

MESA’s Position


MESA unequivocally supports the right of Sudanese academics, whether students, university faculty members, or independent scholars, to voice their opinions nonviolently without fear of retribution of any kind.  We stress that freedom of expression, freedom of association, and academic freedom are expressly protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Sudan is a party.  We call on the Sudanese government and security forces immediately to cease violent suppression of peaceful protest and detention of non-violent protestors.  We further call on them immediately to release all detained protestors, whether academics or otherwise.  We express our alarm at the deteriorating condition of academic and personal freedom in Sudan and our hope that peaceful, democratic solutions will prevail.

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