Nights in Khartoum

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I had forgotten how busy Thursday nights can be in Khartoum. For the wealthy and the well-to-do, it is a night for parties, for family celebrations, for weddings and engagements. I was walking along the usually bustling street, moving much more quickly than the amjads and rickshaws that I could have been taking, weaving in and out of the traffic, pushing past people and doing my best not to respond to the crude or curious calls of “khawaja”, ‘white man.’

Amidst the car horns and exhaust fumes, men climb out of their cars in the crisp white Muslim attire – the tagia (cap) and gelabia (long shirt), escorting their wives who have stepped elegantly out of their cars or taxis, wrapped in colourful and shimmering toaps, tottering on high, thin heels and glancing austerely at their surroundings. Beside them, the simply-dressed street children, mostly IDPs (internally displaced persons) from Southern Sudan, look ragged and untidy, but you have the sense that these elegant women are glad to be looking down on someone. The Southern Sudanese kids are bustling around, trying to keep busy washing cars or keep out of the way and I am reminded, absurdly, of the opening scene from My Fair Lady when the opulent high society are leaving their central London ball, met by mingling flower girls on the street. “Buy a flower off a poor girl.” But Arabic kitsch plastic flowers are about the best that can be done in Khartoum, so the image rapidly evaporates. Bizarre that such a comparison can be made in a country and time so far removed from turn of the century London. In essentials, perhaps we do not change.

It is little wonder that the Darfur crisis began because Darfurians suggested that the Government was neglecting their arid and desolate region. Since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, Khartoum has developed in leaps and sandy bounds; full of prosperous locals, opportunities and paved roads. High rises are slowly rising high, and yet another bridge across the Nile is almost finished. Of course, many developing countries have capitals that are more developed with better social indicators than their rural areas (the seat of Government needs to look like a seat of Government). However, Khartoum has developed at a cost and the cost is borne by the rural states, including the three states of Darfur.

While private investment booms in Khartoum, turning the largely uninteresting city into a predicted “Dubai of North Africa,” public investment is sadly lacking in Darfur. For over three years, everyone from the UN Secretary-General to the President of the United States to actors George Clooney and Mia Farrow have been calling a stop to the conflict in Darfur. And nothing changes. For four years the Government has been content in letting humanitarian agencies do the work of the Government and provide basic services to two-thirds of the entire population of Sudan’s western region. And nothing changes. No sanctions, no political pressure, no mass public awareness.

What is perhaps the most frustrating factor is the limited public concern over the situation. Not just in Western countries where people are keenly aware of social responsibility, in theory, if not in practice, but in Sudan itself. The most generous response you may have from someone in Khartoum is a mournful shake of the head – “there’s nothing we can do.” Even in the towns of Darfur, protests in the past have been targeted at the UN, rejecting a UN force; a result of a clever subversive campaign of the Government to move people against a “colonising” external force, irrespective of motivation and intention.

Perhaps it is too unfair to say that people in Khartoum do not, nor will not, care about the ongoing hardship of their compatriots. But they are very good at ignoring it. Like millions in the West who dismiss Darfur as another blight on this vast continent – as someone in Sydney told me, “It’s Africa; what do you expect?” – Khartoum-dwellers (IDPs notwithstanding) are getting comfortable with life. The standard of life is increasing in Khartoum. It is almost as if the buildings that are going up are obscuring Darfurians from the sight of those in Khartoum. They are still in the shadows, easily ignored.

In late 2007, however, it became impossible for northern and southern Sudanese alike to ignore internal disparities any longer with the suspension of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) by the Government of Southern Sudan. The Government of ‘National Unity’ had rightly been accused of failing to comply with a number of provisions in the CPA, particularly withdrawing troops from Southern Sudan (to be replaced by Southern Sudanese troops from the former SLPA) and finalising boundaries between North and South, leaving the buffer states vulnerable to exploitation. The reason? Oil. Oil and private investment is funding the extraordinary development of Khartoum. Oil is funding the government’s war in Darfur. However, oil revenue is not making its way to the vastly under-resourced and under-developed South, largely because the border between North and South remains unclear, representing the Government’s direct contravention of the CPA.

I left Sudan when we in the middle of coordinating responses to flooding and cholera in North Sudan, in addition to the ongoing complex emergency response in Darfur. I had been there – based in Khartoum – for two years, travelling out to Darfur frequently, in addition to other focus states to support field operations and emergency response of a big agency. Of course, when you are in the thick of work in a situation like this, you take it for granted that your work is making some semblance of a contribution to improving lives – and maybe it is – but standing back and looking from afar, you begin to doubt. Since I left Sudan, the CPA has been suspended once, a rebel group has made an attack on the city I used to call home, the Government resumed bombing in Darfur, the key area of Abyei was half destroyed and the President of Sudan has been accused of crimes against humanity, further compromising a fragile peace. What next for this country?

I have no illusions that the process of development as it stands is perfect – nor my minor role in it – but it is a system slowly changing. Let’s just hope it changes with the most vulnerable people at the centre; that they are ultimately able to claim the rights that have been deprived them for so long. Without access to these basic freedoms, there is no real development.