Anti-dam protesters, farmers detained in Sudan

On Sunday, agents of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) detained two leading anti-dam protesters in Abri in Northern State. In eastern Sudan, 27 residents of Atbara and Setit were jailed.

A senior member of the Committee Against the Kajbar Dam reported to Radio Dabanga that a group of security officers raided a coffee shop at the market of Abri, managed by committee members Fikri Hassan Taha, and took him to the NISS office in the town.

“At the same time, other security men stormed the home of the secretary of the Committee against the Dal Dam, Salah Abdelrahman, and took him also to a NISS office in Abri,” he said.

He said that NISS agents in Abri summoned Nizar Sabouna on Thursday on charges of inciting parents in the town not to send their children to school, in protest against the factory in the area that uses harmful cyanide to extract gold from ore.

Atbara-Setit Dam Complex​

In eastern Sudan, 27 residents of Atbara and Setit were detained by the NISS yesterday.

Mubarak El Nour, member of the El Gedaref parliament for El Fashaga constituency, said the people were held at their farms on Sunday morning “under the pretext that their farms have been confiscated for the benefit of the Electricity Ministry”.

He said that the farmers are being held in the prison of El Gedaref. Their relatives are not allowed to visit them.

The Merowe Dam, also known as the Hamadab Dam, in Sudan’s Northern State was officially launched in 2010. It doubled Sudan’s electricity generation capacity but displaced more than 50,000 people, who are still waiting for compensation.

The northern Sudanese living in the areas where the Kajbar and Dal dams are planned, are continuing their protests against the new power plants.

Power

During the past decades, the government of Sudan developed plans to increase the provision of power by the construction of a number of extra dams in northern and eastern Sudan.

In February this year, the operation of the first turbine of the Upper Atbara-Setit Dam Complex in the El Gedaref-Kassala border area was inaugurated by the Sudanese president.

The 30,000 families displaced by the mega-project complain of high rates of unemployment and poverty because of the government’s non-commitment to compensate the damages to their farmlands.