#SudanRevolts: Notes from the fringes of a revolution

I didn't know much about Sudan last summer, when I was offered an internship with SIHA- a regional women's rights network based in Kampala, Uganda. Trying to further women's rights across a region that encompasses Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda is no small undertaking. There's a lot of issues there. After extensive research (ahem, quick glance at their website), I realised SIHA focused much of their work on Sudan and set about learning as much as I could about the status of women there and the issues they faced.

What I learned wasn't very encouraging. Al-Bashir, the President of Sudan and his ruling NCP party have instituted a corrupted form of Shar'ia law. The ridiculously restrictive Public Order Laws have little to do with Islam but instead are used as a tool to exert social and political control on the country's citizens. Women can be arrested, fined or even lashed for "offences" such as wearing make-up or trousers, drinking alcohol or being alone with a man to whom they are not related (even in an office environment). Stoning is rare but unfortunately not unheard of. Outside of the capital Khartoum, the situation for women was even worse. Al-Bashir's regime was waging a genocidal campaign in Darfur where thousands of women had been raped or sexually assaulted by the Sudanese Armed Forces and their associated militias. Conflict had once again broken out in the border state of South Kordofan in June and early reports indicated the same policies of sexualised violence as a weapon to intimidate, terrorise and punish women (and whole communities) were also being instituted there.

A grim but unfortunately accurate summation. Fresh off the plane in Kampala and deposited at SIHA's rather leafy offices, I was fortunate enough to meet many Sudanese women who worked for or with SIHA or who attended the various workshops SIHA ran for women human rights defenders.

At first I was intimidated by these women. In my mind, they were Human Rights Defenders- capitals intended. They risked imprisonment, torture, rape and other horrific consequences for the work they did. But thinking about them in such terms made me forget that they were women first- and in some case girls. They wore nail varnish and eyeliner like I did, some of them had daughters my age, some were my age. The older women laughed at my pink skinny jeans while the younger girls lusted after my H&M sandals and at the coffee breaks we all sat around chatting and gossiping.

Seeing them in such human terms didn’t make the work they did any less impressive. If anything, it made it more. Most of these women would prefer to just get on with their lives, their biggest problem being what to throw together for dinner after work or if that boy they liked would ask them out. Instead, they found themselves thrown into a fight, out of their control.  One doctor, thinking of her own daughter at home, couldn’t turn away a young girl who’d been raped as a punishment for some imagined infringement. A lawyer couldn’t turn away the case of a female street vender who was imprisoned for selling alcohol, thinking what she would have done if her husband had left her and she had no other means of supporting her children in a country that wages war against its citizens but doesn’t provide them with social welfare. One journalist was imprisoned for reporting rapes carried out by members of the police and army. The government said that writing about such “unproven allegations” was akin to spreading lies.

These women didn’t want to be Human Rights Defenders. They just were. The term itself is problematic. It’s not a profession as such, something to be put on a CV. These women were from different walks of life. Some of them were professionals, some weren’t.  Some were very religious, some weren’t. Some of them were nicer and friendlier than others. Being a human rights defender doesn’t make you a saint. It’s incredibly stressful and many of the women showed signs of a life of tense, constantly looking over their shoulder, pressure.

Meeting Safia, in particular, made a huge impression upon me. Safia was a young artist and student who had dabbled with Girifna- a political activist group largely made up of students. She handed out some leaflets which denounced the regime and attended a rally. Nothing remarkable. But then she was kidnapped off the street, taken to a ‘ghost house’ and beaten, raped and tortured by three men. They knew who she was and they knew of her so called ‘political activities’. What happened to Safia was meant as a punishment for her and a warning to others.

Safia, demonstrating remarkable strength, spoke out about her ordeal and was forced to flee Sudan for her own safety. When I met her in Kampala, she was quiet but friendly, with a soft smile. She was remarkably pretty, with amazing cheekbones and short hair. As I got to know her better, she was no longer a Human Rights Defender or a Brave Woman. She was Safia, who was much more than one horrible thing that happened to her. She was an amazing artist, an expert at plaiting hair, terrible at time keeping and partial to the odd Pixar movie.  She liked brightly coloured jewellery, coffee and chocolate.

Safia

Safia with Hala Al-Karib at the opening of her first exhibition in Kampala, Novermber 2011

Safia and I at her exhibtion

Preparing Eid-Al Adha

Enjoying Eid Al-Adha!

With Zainaab Blindio, Executive Direcotr of Ru'ya Association from South Kordofan

Enjoying some good Kordofanian cooking!

 

It’s important to see these women as who they really are, not as the terrible things that have happened to them or as remote creatures who are impossibly brave. Often, I discovered, they are terrified, constantly worried and stressed. But they just carry on, like women all over the world do when they have burdens to bear.

When the revolts began in Sudan, I was pleased in a way. Maybe finally this was it, the beginning of the end for Bashir. But I was also scared, in case it wasn’t. What if these girls were going out on a limb and would bear the brunt of the inevitable repression if no one backed them up?

There's not much you can do from a desk in North London, besides obsessively checking the frustratingly scant news reports coming out. I wrote some articles about what was going on. I joined Twitter and obsessively tweeted and retweeted any updates on the situation I came across. It's bizarre, watching a revolution unfold on your computer screen, comprised of a mish mash of tweets, blog posts and the stale language of international news reports, from your 9-5. First thing in the morning, drinking coffee and trying to do my hair, I would check all my networks to see if anything had happened overnight. Overgrounding it to work, there would be more coffee when I got to the office and more digital monitoring. I began to build up some good links with activists on the ground and activists or journalists in Europe and the US who had much wider links than I did so the information I gleaned from Khartoum could reach people in London and New York who might have some clout. Or at least the means to get the issue more publicity.

I would check my twitter, facebook and emails last thing at night before I went to sleep. One weekday night when a few after work drinks had turned into an unplanned session, I returned home sometime after 3 in the morning and discovered my inbox crowded with messages about an activist, whom I had befriended through twitter and emails, had been arrested earlier that day. No one knew where she was. All I could do was send a few well chosen tweets to try and publicise her disappearance, hoping those better known than me would retweet it and help to pressure the Sudanese authorities into releasing her. Tweeting from my nice warm flat in London about this girl languishing in a cell somewhere in Kharotum, having been in a Camden pub when it was actually happening, made me feel incredibly guilty. But there was nothing else to do.

 

The protest movement known as Sudan Revolts fizzled out somewhat but I wasn’t disheartened like some (see this piece which expresses why not much more eloquently than I ever could) . I know there are many people in Sudan working quietly, at great personal risk as always, to end the genocidal regime of Bashir. But I shared in the anger of many at the recent protests in Khartoum against the now nototious anti-Islam viral video. These people will attempt to storm foreign embassies in anger at a slight against Islam yet they will not join their fellow citizens protesting in the streets at their own leader who corrupts Islam every day in their name?  I know many Sudanese activists who were deeply and personally hurt by that and I do not blame them.  

Sudan Revolts didn't explode in some sort of Arab Spring like some pundits predicted it would. But those people were never looking at the Sudanese case as the unique situation it is, but were instead lumping into into the category of "Arab" and assuming it would go down the path of Libya or Syria. That was a mistake and part of the reason why some international commentators have written off Sudan Revolts as a flash in the pan. It should be given credit for what it achieved and seen as a step on the road to revolution. Bashir will eventually fall and Sudan Revolts will be one of the most important catalysts in the series of events it will take to oust him. Most dictators don't fall in a day.

So there you have it; notes from the (extreme) fringes of a revolution. #SudanRevolts.