Sudan: Security officers detain, insult ‘black’ Nuba man

A week ago, a bus passenger from the Nuba Mountains was insulted and briefly detained by security personnel in Kosti in White Nile state. He was released after pressure from fellow passengers who refused to proceed to Khartoum without him.

The Sudanese Human Rights and Development Organisation (HUDO) reported in a statement today that on February 17, Hasan El Amin was traveling by bus from Abu Jubeiha in the eastern part of South Kordofan to Khartoum.

When the bus stopped at the western checkpoint of Kosti, three security agents in civilian clothes entered the bus for a regular check of the passengers. On reaching El Amin’s seat, they asked him questions like “Why are you so black?”, and “Are you Sudanese?”

He showed them his identity card but they insisted on taking him to their office. There he was insulted further and called “a slave” (abid). He was released from the security checkpoint office after two hours, because his fellow passengers refused to leave without him.

El Amin is 29 years and a university graduate. He is from Tira tribe in the Nuba Mountains.

All buses from Abu Jubeiha to Khartoum pass through Kosti. The checkpoints are managed by members of the Sudan Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, HUDO states.

The human rights organisation urges the Sudanese government to hold to account those responsible for El Amin’s detention and oral assaults, to stop “any kind of discriminative acts against citizens from conflict areas or based on ethnicity, and “to take stern measures in combating any racial discriminative behaviour”.

Last year in November, political analyst and journalist El Haj Warrag pointed to racism in Sudan being the primary cause of the atrocities committed in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and other areas of Sudan.

During a workshop concerning peace issues in Khartoum, Warrag warned that failure to eradicate such racist culture could lead to the repetition of these atrocities in the country. The 1989 coup [which brought the Al Bashir regime to power] could only succeed because of the widespread existence of racism, he said.

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