You aren’t wriggling out of this one”.. And No more twist and turn

The million square miles of Sudan thses days are filled with lies and propaganda. Searching for the truth or facts about anything in this land of spin is a mind-boggling task for any contemporary observer. From a Western standard of judgment, the horrific crimes addressed by the ICC are appalling. Any Sudanese Muslim or Christian should be more appalled by these crimes than the rest of the world, because these are our own people.
Sadly, this may not be the case if you judge by the words of the regime’s puppets in the local media, such as Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, or the hired-in-a-hurry former communist media propagandists from the SPLA who now work for the National Congress Party (NCP), or those seeking favors from the regime who see this as an opportunity to exploit. I find such people to be insensitive babblers willing to manipulate and silence the truth for a period of time.
The unstoppable flow of propaganda coming from Khartoum media, like a record album that keeps skipping in the same place, is tarnishing the reputation of the profession and Sudan’s media history in general. It’s time someone stood up and took note, or in my case here, addressed them using the low, unprofessional language that they only understand.
Some out-of-date Sudanese politicians also need to understand that it was this renewed sense of religious purpose by the regime that had rekindled the long-standing rivalry between Sudan’s tribes and imparted the past brutality since this mafia mushroomed from nowhere in September 1983. Although ethnic differences were a cause too through past centuries, this was present since the old kingdoms all over Sudan and cannot be allowed to be ignited today by this dishonored mafia.
We must strive to understand the untold story of the oppressed majority of the Sudanese people. They are waiting for the regime’s shock period to pass and for reality to sink in after the sealed envelope of charges has been delivered. The perpetrators will then realize there is no way they can wriggle out of this predicament. There is no middle ground, even if they try to bargain Darfur’s land and oil with the Bush oil crooks, bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or open the doors for the jihadist network, as the top accused hinted at as options on TV lately.
Whatever they do, one thing is clear: they have lost the trust and respect of a nation that I doubt will forget or forgive them anymore, as they did in the past. They will never be forgiven by this mafia that turned their peaceful land into a Taliban state, orphaning millions and displacing several more. Not to mention the countless figures they maimed or killed. So let us never tire of reminding them of some of their crimes again and again.
Yes, they deny their actions when it suits them; they are nothing but fanatical Islamists. But we know they have lied from day one. They executed and expelled 11,000 soldiers and 4,000 of the finest officers in the Sudanese Army in the first months because this mafia, for good reasons, did not trust the once most disciplined army in Africa that they shamed. So they created their own fanatical Popular Defense Army (PDF), with only cursory weapons training and a booklet of Koranic sayings. The PDF practiced the mindless tactic of mass onslaught, which provided innumerable martyrs but rarely brought victory.

The mafia did not stop there but went on to replace 80% of civil servants with its illiterate thugs, siphoning their pensions. It created a police state and let loose its militant hardliners armed with sticks and iron bars to roam the streets, beating up women and young students for not dressing in an Islamic Saudi way or because they were not fanatics enough like them. Under them, torture became routine. One could list a million criminal acts having nothing to do with Islam, and to mention a few more of their Taliban-like mentality, even the staff of the antiquities departments were locked up, reportedly because there were more Christian than Islamic ruins displayed.
And yesterday, while Al-Bashir was putting on a fast-breaking get-together show with our Copts, ironically, how dare he think we will forget the days when even peaceful Atbra, Shandi, and old Omdurman had their churches closed, and the majority of the Copts, the sons and daughters of Aloa, were made to flee the country? Pity they did so and did not scream foul like other victims of Al-Bashir’s ethnic cleansing, purely because their old Christian beliefs advocate against that and against even meddling in politics, unlike some today, but encouraged to pray for their Islamist fanatic cousins’ sins.
Likewise, our Sufis were not spared either after they were demonized and branded as non-Islamic. Their Khalawi lifeline charitable contributions were discouraged, and their followers, who have nothing and expect nothing on this earth except poverty, misery, and oppression, were made a tourist attraction, and their Khalawi became a sightseeing spot for Wahhabi visitors. They basically tore apart our social fabric all over to as far as the East and ended up bargaining Halaib in return for Egypt’s forgiveness after their failed jihadist attempt to kill its leader, then turned on Darfur where their crimes still continue.
It’s sickening that they think every time here and there they can change their skin and disguise and tend to believe we are fooled by such. One could be tempted to go on and reveal what we know off-record and on-record about this mafia’s “barbaric” and “medieval” frame of mind, but we prefer the Sudanese way of keeping what goes on that one saw or was said behind doors there, although what we know is in the public interest but would shock the world. Our cherished Sudanese unique way in political disputes has turned out to be useless in dealing with such criminals today and has been tarnished beyond repair by this mafia, and all will come out in time if we decide to speed their departures!
For now, we are not here only to re-record the painful crimes of this mafia, as they can’t erase them from our memories, but to refresh the memories of those ignorant propagandists or those who have laps. The regime may now try their old favorite trick of distraction, Turabi versus Bashir, a childish lie that really worked when they came to power, Turabi to prison to shield the newcomers, and just before 9/11 to fool the West, and in Darfur now to demonize them as Turabi’s boys to the Sudanese. The whole world seems to fall for it again and again, but the mafia knows we don’t fall for that; we know.
What is baffling in their talking shops is why they suddenly think they are different today from their partners in crime yesterday? And what is new about the regime mafia? Just to refresh your mind again, try to compare or reflect on their speeches days before the ICC call and when they came to power. Isn’t that the same Al-Bashir repeating himself? Who said soon after taking power: “There would be action; no mercy for rebels, just victory for Sudan, and for Islam. Sharia law would be enforced. ‘I vow here before you to purge from our ranks the renegades, the hirelings, enemies of the people and enemies of the armed forces,'” on rally after rally in Khartoum, holding a Koran and a Kalashnikov? He goes on, “Anyone who betrays this nation does not deserve the honor of living. . . . There will be no fifth column. The masses have to purge their ranks.” Adding the usual line of rhetoric, “The war had been incited by ‘Zionists, crusaders and arrogant persons.'” Those Muslims who deal with dissidents and rebels and raise doubts about the legality of jihads are hypocrites and dissenters and apostates for the Islamic religion. Their lot is to suffer torture in hell for eternity.
I guess he didn’t say that to Turabi when the latter insensitively or frankly raised doubt about that jihad, even if just in reminding him why he lost a family member on it if that was the case. Forget about the feeling of the innumerable mothers of what he called “Fatisa.” But unashamed, the regime is willing to keep on deceiving and manipulating our people with these sorts of religious rhetorics. Again, I could go on and on, and yes, we heard the same lines of excuses and the usual “Malesh” but followed by threats and rhetoric in a turn and twist year after year. As they say, “He who is caught in a lie is not believed when he tells the truth.” But yes, not anymore. Who do you think you’re kidding, Mr. Hitler?
For the regime to lean now, when cornered, on the double faces of the Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), trying to repeat the story of Nimairi’s National Reconciliation Agreement of 1978 with the usual buying-time promises for groups of dummies who dropped in attitudes of self-conscious arrogance, is misguided. They seem to be forgetting the facts that they achieved nothing when they were holidaying abroad in the name of Sudan’s opposition for more than twenty years, not to forget too that they were out of the country for an equal period before that during Nimairi’s years also in the name of the people of Sudan’s dream of long-seeking democracy without military dictators and religious fanatics. Give me a break! I think they are all playing on the notoriously short memories of the electorate, but this time there is no place for the out-of-date old turtle politicians who only happen to represent the Sudanese people by false inheritance of titles or are appointed only by the sole owners of Sudan’s religious traditional main parties. In the Sudan we want to see, such contempt for our country’s situation and our civil rights today, as they did in the past, shows that these old dummies cannot be trusted to protect them again. The absence of a valid opposition alternative in the coming election for the regime to fear and without guarantees to guard the outcome and dismantle the old one is enough reason for all armed rebellions to stand firm.
Future generations deserve better than this selfishness and this cycle of failure through Sudan’s history has to stop, by our today’s generation in confronting the laid-back attitude in facing injustice and the “Malesh” culture. The regime is bent on the country’s inevitable fragmentation, so it is important too that we diffuse the fear portrayed by this mafia about the expected 26,000 UNAMID force that will soon be there, and their fear that it has only one intention to occupy the country, or fearing the minority black southerners and Darfuris are being used to root out Islam or the Arab race from Africa by Zionists, or about the former colonial powers being after Sudan’s resources, etc. These are all unfounded normal propaganda and conspiracy theories always used by dictatorial regimes to buy more time and extend their control over power, used by such all over the globe. What is really true here, and we can assure the regime about, is that it’s all about removing them from power for good and freeing the nation, democracy, the rule of law and order, the orphaned, the street children, the displaced, respected institutions, and efficiency and accountability above all. And they should make no mistake about it; no mincing of words here. Then the above imaginaries or possible threats will all be gone the day this mafia is gone, or worse, these will willingly be turned to reality if they were to try to wriggle or drag their feet on the way out or became stubborn and waited to see their end.
The problem in Sudan was that values had changed to a Hobbesian sense of survival at all costs, certainly at the cost of anyone else. The suddenly overnight turned millionaire members of this mafia and its beneficiaries are roaming the streets in their Chinese imported white Jalabiyas, driving all new imported models of cars, accumulating lands fraudulently by their Islamist debt trap banks, and living in houses more expensive than any pads in New York, London, or Monte Carlo. They jet off in and out of the country for holidays in the non-Islamic leisure paradises of the Far East for cavorting jihads that they only know, all paid for by what they milked out of Sudan’s oil and resources and even from the illegal dollar returns from the scarce Sudan main diet of grain Durah that they exported to the Gulf states, camels, and Europe’s beer breweries. Even worse, they are now profiting from the logistical support to aid agencies that are feeding their victims.
While millions, like Ahmed or Halima and her malnourished children, are deprived of it, they ended up under a rag of plastic or a piece of foreign aid boxes’ carton board, too traumatized for years with no belonging. Some were squatted around towns or in the squalid camps waiting for food handouts to be shipped from the end of the world by foreign organizations for all over the country. Many displaced camps while the regime talk about exporting more of their foods, as if that’s not enough torture and humiliation in their own country, they now stand accused, surrounded, and punished daily by security officers carrying Uzi machine guns, electric cattle prods, and truncheons, instilling fear in these unfortunate camps dwellers. You tell me, do they really need to listen to the mafia propaganda shouting “Takbir..Tahhleel” or “Al-Bashir is innocent” as if? Or “Death to Ocampo!” from behind the last Benz model wheels? This is the kind of Islam that Al-Bashir’s mafia were taught in Saudi Arabia or Tehran, but most certainly not in Sudan and Sudan’s Khalawi that for centuries bent backward and fed all of Sudan’s starving, welcomed the homeless, helped the dispossessed, shouldered the sick and the orphans, and beside all that, spread tolerance and peace. Then remember, Mr. Al-Bashir and your Goebbels lot, when they did that, there were no oil dollars then.
Al-Bashir and his Wahhabi followers may need to reflect deeply during this month of Ramadan if they know the meaning of it. Dropping to their knees for five times a day in prayers in a facade show or growing their beards does not make them good Muslims when, at the same time, they are stealing the nation’s poor and the orphans’ food. Like Al-Bashir giving his brother the lion’s share of Sudan’s oil exploration commissions, building and selling for profit thousands of luxury presidential villas thoughtlessly about the millions he made homeless who are not even in makeshift camps, gifting foreign footballers the latest models of cars, and just a stone’s throw from his palace, hundreds of thousands of orphan street children as young as ten years old, who are the products of his wars, are crushed daily under car wheels desperately running between them begging for food and shelter, and he is happy to call them “Shamasa” or label them as JEM members. Spare me your incompetent cronies’ rhetoric and the loud expressed reminders about the sand castles’ development in the north, where mostly all are about waste of public money, white elephant dams to generate electricity for exports by companies his crooks already own and know they will pocket the revenue from its sales, not the northern people. They forget we don’t eat electricity in the desert north, a region with no real infrastructure gains only what was left by the British and Turkish rule. However, already most have collapsed or do not exist today on the ground, but you only hear about new ones on Al-Bashir’s propagandist media, and all are nothing but dream projects that are ill-thought, about large mechanized agricultural farms for the Arab Gulf wealthy along the Nile that will spell the end of traditional farming and see the displacement of our people who have for centuries survived every famine and drought that other regions couldn’t endure. But this is the regime propagandist’s tricks and selling tactics when the real intention is always to steal others’ lands like what they did in the East for their wealthy Islamist Arab sheikhs’ banks.
The facts and the reality again on the ground are that still today, hundreds of thousands of northerners in the vast deserts are starving, and many are displaced, shielded from international focus because Al-Bashir counted himself as one of them, and they are paying the price for this unwanted association with this mafia. The unfortunate among them have only a chance at a day’s meal by running after those passing by Khartoum’s holiday buses and trains to Cairo, begging its passengers to throw them some leftover foods. There is another sinister motive behind these blackmail sweet talks about more development to counter the ICC in return for solidarity, which is also the expressed intention or aim by Al-Bashir’s advisors recently to mobilize racially the entire 18 million Nubian population to shield him from the coming arrest warrant. You wish, dream on! You will see them soon putting an end to this shambolic state of Sudan’s state.
Away from this personal note, it is a matter of fact that putting this mafia before world justice will not just end the self-defeating see-saw banging against the gravity of history that Sudan seems caught in, but will put an end to the many selfish army generals’ both in Africa and the Arab world from stealing their people’s will.
I think Al-Bashir should think about Hitler’s last days, Saddam in his pants, or at least Pinochet. These are his only choices now. For me, if one helpless Chinese could stand in front of the mercy of the mighty Chinese army tanks, then it is enough if one Sudanese stands up in defiance of the sticks and iron bars of the militant lunatics of his.