Sudanese
dictator Omar el-Bashir has fallen, deposed by his own army. As I
write (April 14 2019), it’s not yet clear how events will play out.
What looks like an attempt to hold on to power by the army appears to
have failed, or at least to have been strongly opposed.
 |
| Bashir (US Navy/Jesse Awalt) |
Sudan
has disposed of dictators before. In 1985 Jaafar Nimeiry, who had
himself come to power through a coup, was peacefully deposed and the
country underwent a transition to democracy. The latter lasted only a
few years before crumpling under the stress of the civil war in the
south, and a declining economy. On June 30 1989 el-Bashir, then a
45-year-old colonel, seized power.
At
the time I was a development volunteer for Sudan’s Refugee
Settlement Administration in Showak, a small town about seven hours’
drive from Khartoum near the Eritrean border. I later wrote my own
account of what happened in the days that followed. It went into my
book on my time in Sudan, Even the Dead Are Coming. Like all
‘on-the-ground’ accounts of an event, it lacks perspective; I saw
only what I saw. But here it is, for what it is worth. I have made
some edits so that it can stand alone, but otherwise it is much as I
wrote it a year or so after the coup.
I
ONE
morning halfway through June 1989 my colleague Ali and I went to
Gedaref. Ali had some business to do there, and so had I; I wanted to
try and persuade the UNHCR office in the city to open their files on
refugee protection cases for the third issue of the magazine I was
publishing for the Administration.
At
nine, we went to the house of the head of our Gedaref office, Ismail
Ibrahim, who had kindly invited us for breakfast. (Work in a Sudanese
office starts at 7.30am, and breakfast is taken between 9.00 and
10.00.) We walked through the industrial souk, or montega,
towards the house. The montega was a riot of unguarded welding
machinery, rotting cars waiting to be spliced together, and piles of
nuts and bolts all over the ground. Among the montega’s more
fun features were large drainage shafts about two feet square, sunk
into the middle of the busiest pedestrian thoroughfares. There were
no rails or covers of any sort on these, and a pond of black, oily
water could be seen about three feet down. That morning I nearly fell
down one, much to Ismail’s amusement. In fact he was the culprit as
he had distracted my attention by telling me the results of the
European elections in Britain, which he had heard on World Service
that morning. The Conservatives, he was telling me, had taken an
almighty pasting. Had I gone down the drainage-shaft, I should at
least have died happy.
Politics
was also discussed at breakfast. A friend of Ismail’s, an Army
officer, ate with us; he was reading from the front page of one of
the daily newspapers. It seemed that 17 senior officers had been
arrested and charged after a failed coup plot against the government
of Sadiq el-Mahdi had been discovered the day before. There was much
speculation as to exactly what was going on.
What
was? In the light of what happened not long after, it would be
fascinating to know. Perhaps it was a feint, designed by the
perpetrators of the later, real, plot, to lull Sadiq into a false
sense of security. Or possibly the later coup was sparked off by a
wish to rescue the 17, as much as anything else. In any case, after
the arrests, no-one really expected further trouble that month. It
was not on my mind at all.
About
two weeks later, on the night of June 30 several of us gathered over
a bowl of punch in the compound. The base for this punch was
industrial aragi, the local arak; the taste (which was rough)
was disguised by karkadee, an
infusion of hibiscus, with lashings of sugar. It was Thursday
night; as no-one was working on Friday, that being the Moslem
sabbath, this was the night at the pub. It rained heavily. There was
much thunder and lightning, and we took shelter in Simon’s hut.
The dog Shaggy joined us; an unpopular move, as she stank horribly.
At about nine, the electricity went off. This was unusual; it had
done so far less that year. At
about midnight I decided that I had had enough, and dashed through
the heavy rods of rain to my own hut,
where I balanced my torch on a shelf and got ready for bed. As often
happened during the rains, it was cool. I had a good night’s sleep.
I
awoke on the morning of July 1 to find the sun shining cleanly; it
was hot, of course, but there was a freshness, as the rain in the
night had evaporated and cooled the air a bit. Ian was just outside
my hut, working on one of the
motorbikes.
“Did
you hear, there’s been a coup or something,” he grunted.
“Oh,”
I said. Then: “Would you like some tea?”
 |
| A neighbour's children (M.Robbins) |
II
FRIENDS
IN Khartoum were closer to events. As one, an Englishman, explained:
I
don’t know how your coup went... It was rather bizarre for me. I
had gone to bed, as usual, in the front yard,
completely sober, and about three in the morning was woken by a
tremendous rumbling sound which at first I thought might represent
the effects of a particularly badly-made fish stew concocted earlier.
I rapidly realized, however, that the sound...was in fact caused by
the passing of a number of tanks in the street...I attempted to get
up to have a closer recce but was...restrained by my mosquito-net in
which, in my haste, I got tangled up (James Bond never used a
mosquito-net and now I know why). I got to the wall in time to see a
British-made Ferret scout car bringing up the rear. It did cross my
mind that it might be a coup but it seemed a bit of a cliche to be
doing it that way so I put it down to some Sudanese tank commander...
going to visit his relatives...
He
went back to sleep.
Information
on World Service the next morning was perfunctory. A Brigadier Omar
el-Beshir had broadcast on Radio Omdurman, it was reported; the
government of Sadiq, he said, had “beggared the people and made
their lives miserable”. I have to say that this was true. There was
a suggestion that the new military government intended to end the war
in the south, then in truce, as quickly as possible. Several senior
politicians, including Dr Hassen Turabi of the National Islamic Front
and Osman Mirghani of the Democratic Unionist Party, were known to be
under arrest.
The
Prime Minister himself was reported by the BBC as having been seen
being driven from the palace in the early hours, but over the next
few weeks it became clear that he had evaded arrest and was missing.
(Like Nimeiry before him, he spent some years in exile but eventually
returned.) The BBC’s correspondent in Khartoum, who was Sudanese,
was later arrested himself by the new regime.
Savage
travel restrictions were slapped in place straight away. It became
extremely difficult for a foreign national to go anywhere. The
Sudanese themselves found it difficult. The day after the coup Hassen
Osman, the head of the Administration – a very senior figure, and a
powerful man in the region – attempted to reach Khartoum for an
urgent meeting. He spent 11 hours arguing his way through the
checkpoints before he reached the capital. There had always been a
small number of checkpoints on the road, but now there were many, and
some of the new ones between Medani and Khartoum itself were manned
by paratroopers. Other measures depended on who found himself in
charge in a given place. In Kassala, the Army announced that,
henceforth, the number of vehicles run by aid agencies would be
strictly limited, and some were appropriated. Most were later
returned, often with huge mileages racked up; the Forestry Department
in Kassala lost one when the Army crashed it, and left it where
they’d wrecked it.
House
searches began. Europeans appeared to be exempt from this (although
apparently not in Port Sudan). However, the searches were methodical
and comprehensive, and anyone holding stocks of liquor panicked. I
was approached in the street by an Ethiopian refugee who wanted to
sell a consignment of Melotti gin at half-price; I thought it safer
to decline. In fact, the Army were probably looking for hoarded
commodities rather than contraband; it soon became clear that in the
Eastern Region, their priority was to try and make foodstuffs and
other goods available at the “official” prices. These were set by
the state, but everyone had long ignored them. In Khartoum, a curfew
was introduced that ran from sundown to sunrise; later this was
pushed back by three hours. Extra police-posts in the city ensured
that this was strictly enforced.
In
Showak, I was puzzled. Why had the Army staged a coup in a country,
and at a time, when power was a poisoned chalice? I did not at the
time think it political; the Islamist complexion of the new
government was not apparent until later. Indeed, Dr Turabi, the
Islamist leader, was then in prison with all the other politicians.
And the Army appeared to want to end the war in the south, rather
than prosecute it with renewed vigour; the truce remained in place
for the moment, and there still seemed a good chance that it would
become permanent.
I
accepted that the Army simply wanted, as Omer el-Bashir had said in
his initial broadcast, to end corruption and the black market and let
people eat. For the moment, indeed, his priority seemed to be exactly
that. It was soon announced that everything would be sold at the
official price, and lists of these prices were posted by order at
every shop. The reductions were dramatic; goods were listed at the
level fixed by the State under the old regime, figures which had
hitherto simply been ignored. Cigarettes were cut by over 50%. Bread
sank to about 15 piastres a loaf; only in Khartoum had I ever seen it
on sale that cheaply, and that had been nearly two years earlier.
Sugar, a sensitive commodity in a sweet-toothed country, was
henceforth also to sell at its official price - that was, S (Sudanese
pounds) 1.30 a kilo instead of the S9 it had been commanding. Before
long the shops shut, having nothing left that people wished to buy;
or, if they still had it, not being willing to sell it at such a
loss.
 |
| Children at Abuda, 1989 (M.Robbins) |
I
assumed that, this being Sudan, the goods would simply be kept below
the counter and sold to known customers for whatever they were
willing to pay. But I was wrong. A few days after the coup, I was
sitting in my office when two policemen accompanied by an army
officer entered the shop opposite. Beyond the purple shutters I saw
the three talking to the shopkeeper, checking the shelves as they did
so. The four men then left together, and the shutters were drawn
shut, although it was early in the day. This happened to all the
shopkeepers. Many simply remained closed; our local grocer Beshir,
for example. Commodities became scarce. After a few days, a little
sugar became available. It had been seized by the Army on the day of
the coup. They had checked someone’s warehouse and found some 2,000
bags that had been corruptly diverted from local cooperatives before
the coup. Some of this was now sold from the police station at the
official price, and everyone waited in line to receive a bag each; it
was soon gone. Simon joined the queue with everyone else under the
blazing sun, and came back with a kilo in his hand; he waved it
around triumphantly. But it was the last we would see for a while.
Brewing operations came to a halt. There was barely enough for our
tea.
Cigarettes
were nowhere to be seen in the shops. The boys who had sold them from
blue plywood boxes in the souk were rounded up and chucked off the
streets. Ethiopian Nyalas, which were illicit imports and had never
really been legal, were now available at extraordinary prices if you
knew someone who had hidden his stock; after 10 days those prices
spiralled to S40, five or six times the fatuous official price for
legal cigarettes, of which there were none. I had a new office-boy;
he was excellent at finding cigarettes, and went trotting down to the
souk for me to interview shopkeepers known to his family. He nearly
always returned with something. He and an elder boy had the market
sewn up. We let them keep the change, and I think they did very
nicely. But two weeks after the coup, these supplies also dried up.
Soon afterwards, the office-boy disappeared as well. He was often ill
and Ali had taken him to see Dr Mekki, who advised him to go to
hospital in Gedaref. It seemed he had fallen sick because he and his
family were now up at three every morning to queue for bread.
Why
the chaos? Other parts of the country were not so badly affected. I
heard later that the military commander who had taken control of the
region had not been tough enough for the Young Turks of his regiment,
and had been disposed of in his turn. His usurpers then decided to
take tougher action against the black marketeers. They hit other
targets as well. One day I hitched a lift over to the UN compound
with Barrie Potter, a British colleague who was also a friend. On the
way back, we followed the main road into the town centre through the
red-light district. The road there was blocked by a large green
lorry, surrounded by troops. Women were being herded out of the huts
opposite and onto the back of the lorry, carrying what possessions
they had; occasionally a cassette-player, or a bundle or two. They
seemed to enter the lorry without fuss, but were heavily guarded.
I
mentioned this to a colleague in the office when we got back. He said
he doubted if the whores would come to any harm. “Perhaps the army
at Girba is having a party,” he said with a grin. Then the grin was
replaced by a frown.
“You
know what all this means for us,” he said quietly. “We will have
20 years of this before we try democracy again. Another 20 bloody
years.”
I
nodded. It was just over two weeks after the coup.
I
crossed the courtyard and mounted the stairs to Hassen’s office.
His secretary smiled and stood to greet me. I asked her politely if
he was busy; I knew that he did not appreciate being disturbed when
he was. “Yes, he’s there. Go in, Mike,” she said. I did so. I
rarely went there, for it was the holy of holies. Although spacious,
it was plainly furnished. There were a couple of extra chairs, more
ashtrays than usual and, for some reason, imitation flowers in a vase
on a desk. Otherwise, it looked much the same as any other office in
Showak, complete with flat-topped grey-steel desk. Hassen was sitting
behind it, writing. He greeted me politely. “Sit down,” he said;
he looked as completely in control as he had ever been.
“I
want to know whether I’m going to print another issue of the
magazine,” I said. (This was a publicity tool for the
Administration; it had been my main work in Showak.) “I didn’t
ask earlier because I doubted if you’d know yet. And I thought you
might have other things on your mind.”
“Well,
yes, I have.” He smiled slightly. “No, you cannot print another
magazine. Under the new publications law it would be a capital
offence.”
I
was not that surprised. I suggested that I travel to Khartoum to see
my field director, Ibrahim el-Bagir, who might have other work for
me.
Hassen
was still smiling. He knew that I was only two or three months from
completing my posting, and would probably just leave the country from
Khartoum. That was my intention. “Yes, go to Khartoum,” he said.
He thought for a moment, and added: “When you get home, write about
Sudan, about refugees, about what you have seen here.”
I
promised I would. I have.
I
stood and we shook hands, and then I left the office. I never saw him
again; a few days later I did leave Showak, and Hassen was removed
from his post before the end of the year.
Khartoum
was full of rumours as usual. The Acropole Hotel seemed to have new
staff on duty. I was warned to be careful what I said in the lobby.
But there were plenty of cigarettes. I sent 200 back to Showak. And
there was food. We had had nothing to eat in Showak since the coup
but thin stews made mostly from okra, and even before that our diet
had been getting worse. Ibrahim El-Bagir quickly scotched any notions
of my remaining in Sudan. We did not discuss it in detail. He did not
say so, but I think he felt that the nature of my work before the
coup made it more sensible for me to leave the country. So I went to
stay with friends in Khartoum Three, as I had on a previous visit a
few months earlier; they were congenial company. I set about saying
my goodbyes.
My
compound neighbour from Showak, Ian, arrived in Khartoum a week or so
later, having completed his own posting. He was not leaving Sudan
permanently, but would have a holiday in Britain before returning to
start a new job. In the early hours of August 8, we went to the
airport with one of Imbrahim’s drivers. The curfew was being
rigorously enforced; there was a checkpoint every 300 yards, and the
night-passes for both the car and its occupants were scrutinised with
great care. In the airport we went through the usual scrum, fighting
to keep our place in the check-in queue; in the departure lounge we
stepped over the recumbent forms of over a hundred young men who were
waiting for a SudanAir flight to Tripoli, delayed for 24 hours.
Finally we trudged across the apron and underneath the nose of the
Tristar, then up the gangway, past the Royal Mail crest emblazoned on
the fuselage. When the aircraft lifted off into the dawn, I felt a
sense of relief.
But
my mood changed as the aircraft wheeled around above the Mogren, the
confluence of the Blue and White Niles, to pick up its course for
Aswan. For, as I looked down along the wing, I could see the
red-roofed villas set in verdant gardens ringed with date-palms,
nestling beside the silver-blue expanse of the Nile. For a moment, I
fancied I could see oxen and feluccas, but I think we were too high
for that.
III
 |
| Gedaref, 1989 (M.Robbins) |
SUDAN
was not Ethiopia. There were no week-old corpses swinging from the
lamp-posts of Khartoum, as there were under Mengistu Haile Mariam.
But the military government of Omer Beshir continued to prosecute the
war; it also adhered to the principles of Shari’a, Islamic law,
which had in part perpetuated that war. And it dealt harshly with
those who opposed these objectives.
It
was not obvious when I left Sudan that any of this would happen.
Indeed, the new government had suggested that the question of Shari’a
should be subjected to a referendum. On the face of it, this was
reasonable. But human-rights groups outside the country argued that,
regardless of their feelings, people would not have voted against
Shari’a because they would feel instinctively that this would be a
vote against Islam. It may be that the government, knowing this, put
the idea of a referendum forward in order to secure the continuation
of Shari’a law before revealing its own true colours. To the
Western mind, a vote against Shari’a is not a vote against
religion, simply a vote against imposing it on others. But it would
be unreasonable to expect the Sudanese to feel that way. I can
confirm this; staff at the Showak workshop told British volunteers
that they could not vote against Shari’a, yet added that they
actually thought it should be repealed. In any case, the referendum
never took place; in the end the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC),
as it called itself, resorted to more direct methods. Some flavour of
these in the months after the coup can be had from the following
testimony given to Africa Watch soon afterwards, in 1990:
The
atmosphere in Khartoum is extremely tense. Everyone fears arrest and
no-one knows who will be next. The most frightening new development
is the mysterious new security agency, with its secret houses.
…Information is gradually coming out about these ‘safe houses’
but not enough to paint a complete picture… [They include]
the Bar Association club. Other known ‘safe houses’ include the
Central Bank Employees Club, also located on Baladiya Street, and the
Journalists’ Club on Mek Nimir Street. The choice of these clubs is
not accidental, but is intended as a humiliation for the groups who
have tried to resist the junta. As a sort of extra humiliation, the
military have apparently written ‘Human Rights Chamber’ on the
door of the room at the Bar Association club where they beat people
up.
Political
prisoners were not the only victims of the new state. Human-rights
violations on a more general scale began early. While I was still in
Khartoum in August 1989, Ethiopian refugees were told to report to
the security offices, where a number of them were arrested and
deported to points outside the capital. These were refugees holding
permits to live and work in Khartoum, not illegals. In November 1990,
the authorities started to deport displaced southerners (who were
Sudanese citizens) as well, dumping them in open country to the
south. The combination of the civil disorder that followed, and
Sudan’s apparent support for Iraq during the Kuwait crisis, finally
persuaded Ibrahim El-Bagir to remove the remaining volunteers from
Sudan that month. After many years, the VSO programme in Sudan was
closed.
But
things were much worse in the south, where the army deployed what
were called Popular Defence Forces containing numbers of
fundamentalist volunteers. Amnesty International reported that in
October/November 1989 at least 44 villagers had been killed by
pro-government militias in Keiga Alkhel, northwest of Kadugli; this
was probably just the tip of the iceberg. However, there were also
reports of massacres not connected with the war. Both Amnesty
International and Africa Watch stated that the murder of an
Arabic-speaking farmer by Shilluk labourers in White Nile province at
the end of 1989 provoked, within three hours, a bloodbath in which by
the Government’s own admission 191 Shilluk were killed. (Amnesty
International quoted reports that 500 people died.) Arrests were
made, but by mid-1990 no charges had been brought. All of this
happened within a year or so of the coup; the conflict in Darfur was
yet to come.
IV
NOT
LONG before the coup I went to the great lake at Khashm el-Girba. Ali
and I were researching the income-generating potential of the
cooperatives movement, which the Government encouraged. The official
at Showak whose task it was to promote this was badly overworked, but
despite this he took us to see some of the projects in which he was
involved. He was justly proud of what had been achieved. For example,
there was a successful fish-farm near Girba, and we went to inspect
it. The project had worked, and now help was being extended to the
fishermen who were working around the lake, in the hope that their
catch could be more widely sold. It was a valuable source of protein.
So
we went to see them, too. Four of us crossed the dam in a Toyota
Twin-Cab, and then peeled right towards the forest that lined the
shore of the lake. It was a black rim on the horizon, and to reach it
we had to travel over several kilometres of open plain. The rains had
just begun, and the plain was not yet covered in grass; but a little
moisture had softened the earth’s crust and the soil crumbled a
little under the wheels, making them hiss as we sped along.
We
entered the wood quite suddenly, and I gasped, for the grass grew
thickly beneath the trees, which were themselves richly clothed in
leaves. I felt I wasn’t in a desert land any more, but in parkland
by an English country house. Yet there was a difference; here, the
vegetation, fed by underground water from the reservoir, was so lush
and vivid that it almost hurt to look at it. And in the gaps between
the trees it was possible to see a sky so blue against the lurid
green of the grass that the day has etched itself upon my memory.
The
woods were not empty. Rashaida tents, like carpets strung across
poles, and camels could be seen; but the human occupants of the tents
were hidden. We passed them quietly and continued down to the shore
of the lake, finding our fishermen with difficulty. They had no tent
or other shelter, but seemed no less happy for that. They made do
with an anquarayb (string bed), a few pots and pans, a bright
yellow plastic abrique (a
spouted can used for ablutions), and their nets. They slung
these last into the back of the Twin-Cab; it was high noon and they
would catch little, but they were keen to show us what they could do.
They waded into the water off a shallow beach. One held the shore end
of the net; the other swam out a hundred yards or so, and dragged the
other end of the net round in a great arc before returning to the
beach. It was, as I have said, noon; even so they caught a Nile carp
for us and gave it to us as a gift. Ali took it home and got the cook
to prepare it in the mess-building where he lived.
At
one o’clock we made our way back out through the wood, climbing up
and down the hummocks in the earth with care, anxious not to get
stuck on the damp earth. We emerged onto the plain below a sky that
brought to mind the great vaulted dome of a cathedral. For some
reason I found myself thinking of a far-off time and place where
other fishermen had left their nets to follow the son of a carpenter.
Even
the Dead Are Coming is available as an e-book or paperback from
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