Khartoum at War: A personal story by Shamsaddin Dawalbait (Pt 2/2)

Civil society consultant Shamsaddin Dawalbait was among the many inhabitants of Khartoum who left their home after a fierce war had broken out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in mid-April 2023. After a stay of five months in Wad Madani, the capital of El Gezira, Dawalbait travelled back to Khartoum. He later wrote down his impressions of his travel and stay in the war-torn Sudanese capital.

The Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, a Sudanese think-tank based in New York, published Dawalbait’s report about his return to Khartoum on January 20.

Radio Dabanga acquired permission to republish the personal story, of which the first part was posted on Thursday. Below follows the second part, in which Dawalbait explains why he decided to leave his home again, and to give up his plans to set up a ‘Stuck in Khartoum’ platform through which the conditions of the millions of people trapped in ‘ghost town’ Khartoum could be reflected, and to organise home libraries for the people, in particular “the youth trapped in the neighbourhoods”, with copies of the Reading for Change series.

The Reading for Change series was published by the Democratic Thought Project, founded by Dawalbait in 2013, to “introduce and mainstream political thought and culture and an enlightened version of Islam that accepts the rules of fair, democratic governance, women’s rights, universal human rights, culture of development and one that uncompromisingly accommodates diversity in Sudan”.

Since then, more than 350,000 copies of books on Sudanese political culture and thought have become available, free of charge, to reading groups in Sudan. The Project also organised numerous Reading for Change groups which have held thousands of discussion sessions.

---

Khartoum at War: A personal story by Shamsaddin Dawalbait (Part 2/2)

Poverty belt or new centre?

Those many hours of walking, especially in the alleys and markets of the large Mayo neighbourhood, were an opportunity to get to know the people of the Southern Belt* of Khartoum and their lives. As mentioned earlier, life here seemed almost normal if when measured by the number of people present in the area. It did not seem that many families had left after the war broke out. But what kind of life were they living?

These southern Khartoum neighbourhoods were part of the belt of abject poverty that surrounded the tripartite capital almost from all sides: mud houses, bleak alleys, children in ragged clothes, women displaying food for sale on the ground. The war had made it worse by eroding the few sanitation, health, and education services that had been available.

The National Congress Party regime [of Omar Al Bashir (1989-2019), RD] did not even deign to call these areas slums or shanty towns. These names carry economic or class connotations and imply a failure on the part of the government to care for its citizens, especially if they are only a few kilometres away from the Republican Palace and the General Command of the Sudanese Armed Forces, the most important centres of the Sudanese government. Instead, the strategists of the Islamic movement called them the Black Belt, attributing their poverty and social conditions to the skin colour of their residents and thus exempting the ruling regime from any responsibility.

It was amazing to see, in the early days of the war, the hordes, literally hordes, of poor people, carrying what they could of goods and food supplies from the markets and forcibly opened warehouses on their heads or backs, in rickshaws, carts, and wheelbarrows. This produced shock and anger among the residents of central Khartoum, perhaps due to a general feeling that their homes would be next once the warehouses and markets were empty.

In the first days of the war, very few thought that it would open the door to a revolution of the hungry and the poor from the outskirts of the capital, despite the fact that warnings of such a revolution had been circulating unheeded for some time.

Many intellectuals and leaders considered to be progressive were nonetheless biased against the poor and workers, denying, due to their own privileges, ideological or regional biases, or a deficiency in thinking, the implicit protest in poor citizens’ actions during the war. They tended to differentiate between organised urban protests, such as demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, and even armed action, which they support and see as the only ‘moral and constructive form of protest, and the ’violent expressions of anger’ of the poverty belt – which they view as illegitimate**.

They refuse to see that these acts result from the prolonged deprivation of these poor people of the materials, goods, and merchandise that they themselves had in their homes, and from the developmental and social injustices the Sudanese countryside has been suffering from for a long time.

I do not see what our moral right is, we who were educated in schools and universities that provided us with five meals a day in the boarding schools (yes five meals), to preach what we learned in these schools to people who were deprived of education. Or how we, who received state services such as subsidised electricity, water, and health care, can judge Sudanese citizens like us who are deprived of these social goods. Or that how we, who enjoyed security and peace in our homes and neighbourhoods, can condemn those who have lived their whole lives in the shadow of war for disturbing our security!

In the Southern Belt neighbourhoods, support for the RSF is clearly visible, not only in the large numbers of armed local men who wear its uniform, but also in the slogans written in bold letters on the outer walls of houses and among the people in the markets and the main streets when they hear that the RSF has invaded a new area. Often, the loudspeakers in the alleys and markets broadcast songs glorifying the militia and its leaders. If we look at the volume of services, such as medical care, or efforts made by RSF to restore the supply of electricity and water, we can see say that the centre of Khartoum has moved to the south.

North of the Belt

The part of Khartoum most often covered by the media, the area north of Trucks Road (Shari’ El Shahinat), which separates the northern part of Khartoum from the south, has become a ghost town, devoid of people, a place where only stray cats and dogs roam. This also applies to some extent to the neighbourhoods north of 61st Street, in the direction of Al Amarat, and north of Ahmed Khair Street, in Khartoum Two and Khartoum Three. The area north of Al Tabiya Street, it is a military zone, completely inaccessible.

Wherever there remained people in the area between Ahmed Khair Street and Trucks Road, in the neighbourhoods of Al Imtidad, Al Ushra, parts of Al Sahafa Zalat, Al Sahafa Sharg (East), and Arkaweet, they did not exceed 15 to 25 percent of their pre-war numbers. Most of those who stayed in Khartoum were elderly, sick, or those whose financial situation would not allow them to travel and bear the high rents in the provinces. Others stayed to protect their homes from thieves. Their young sons and daughters were forced to stay with their families in Khartoum.

The youth trapped in Khartoum can be considered one of the groups most affected by the ongoing war. All schools and universities were closed on the first day of the war, and the private and public institutions and businesses they were working for ceased functioning. The same applies to shops, barbershops, cafes, and restaurants, which provided work for many young people. There is no entertainment, and of course, the situation only worsened since communications were cut off in February.

The biggest problem, however, for the youth is the intense hostility they face from RSF fighters, themselves young people, whether those who roam the neighbourhoods or those who are stationed in the streets and intersections. Whenever a young man passes by or encounters them, they harass him, detain him, or steal his smartphone and money. The RSF constantly accuse the youth of working for military intelligence and sending them information about RSF coordinates by telephone. They are even accusing them of sending information when communications are completely cut off. The youth are unable to achieve the goal for which they stayed in Khartoum, that is, meeting their families’ needs.

The stranded young men in a residential block, who usually do not number more than five to seven, often gather inside or in front of one of the houses. When I joined them, I found that their conversation was minimal. What conversation there was focused on the war and battle news, from oral sources or estimates based on the direction and volume of gunfire, depending on the speaker’s stance towards the warring factions.

There was also talk about where drinking water could be found, when it was available, when it was cut off, which bakeries were functioning, and other troubles of daily life during a war. When the conversation shifted to playful banter, it revolved around who failed to chop firewood for the charity pot of beans, or who gave up after just five swings of the axe before falling back into silence, enduring seemingly endless days.

Before sunset, everyone returned home, bracing for the new challenge of surviving a long night in pitch darkness, exposed to the dangers of burglars and thieves. Most of those young men I talked to said, “Well, as long as one doesn’t lose their mind, the rest is bearable.”

Therefore, the description ‘ghost town’ is not limited to the neighbourhoods devoid of people but also applies to the remaining residents themselves: to their atrophied bodies and their sad and deeply worried faces. They are harried by the constant terror of news about the deaths of acquaintances by shelling, bombing, or armed robberies, the sounds of cannons and bullets, the clouds of smoke rising from the neighbourhood or the adjacent street, stray shells and empty ammunition cans (you never know when a missile will hit you, your home, or someone from your family), and the groups of armed men roaming their neighbourhoods, always ready to harass them.

Women carry the burden of the war

Because of the risks of harassment, detention, and robbery that men, especially young men, are exposed to outside their homes, middle-aged women take on additional responsibilities for providing their families’ needs. Due to vandalism and destruction of neighbourhood and central markets, whether as a result of plundering or aerial bombardment, mini markets have emerged around bakeries. Street vendors display vegetables, lentils, rice, sugar, powdered milk (often expired months ago), soap, oils (some of which have also expired), and also batteries, in wheelbarrows and donkey carts.

Women are also often responsible for fetching water. I regularly witnessed women pushing a wheelbarrow with jerricans filled with water or carrying a bucket of water on her their shoulder. In many cases, it was women who spoke to the soldiers and their commanders, to complain or ask for help, for example, in transferring a patient to an -often distant- hospital or to release a detained son. Their experience as mothers of children having the same age as the RSF soldiers helped them do this.

Severe food shortages

The bleak days of war begin with women and elderly men carrying their pots early in the morning to get a place in the long lines for charity beans distributed at a soup kitchen. In our neighbourhood, about 120 to 140 people gathered in the line. Some would stay in the nearby shade until about 9:00 when the distribution would begin. Others would head out to look for a loaf at the bakery if it was still open that day. Problems at the bakeries, such as lack of flour, firewood, water for kneading dough, or diesel to power the mixer, were frequent.

During the six months I stayed in Khartoum, the price of bread increased from ten decent-sized loaves for 1,000 Sudanese pounds to just five smaller loaves for the same price. By August, news reports said it had become only four loaves for SDG1,000. The improvised markets around the bakeries offer very limited food options, with no meat, dairy products, or fruit at all. These are only available, and then at very high prices, at the As Soug Al Markazi (Central Market) and the Al Kalakla markets, which makes them unavailable to most people.

Thus, the charitable kitchens” (Gidrat Al Foul and Hallat Al Adas (the fava beans pot and the lentils pan), as they are called locally, which prepare and distribute food free through youth volunteers of the Emergency Response Committees or other youth groups have increasingly become the main source of food for the majority of families in most neighbourhoods. In the neighbourhood where I live, the protracted war has depleted families’ savings, reduced remittances from family members abroad, and interrupted telecommunications networks. Increasingly families complain that this food service is not available every day, only 15 days a month, and that it does not come with bread or other food items.

In contrast, the youth committees supervising these kitchens suffer greatly to provide this service, including facing risks associated with purchasing materials from distant markets. Even when basic materials are available, problems with firewood are frequent, and supervisors have resorted to cutting down neem trees in the neighbourhoods to provide fuel, despite the dire environmental impacts. Sometimes they face water cuts, but the biggest problem is the decline in contributions from relatives abroad, as their responsibilities increase as the war drags on. Despite my attempts to contribute personally and to help find resources from others, the young men who took over the work in the kitchen told me in a call after I had left that they were forced to stop after a crazy rise in the price of beans (from SDG200,000 per 100kg sack to SDG350,000) and a significant decline in remittances from abroad.

RSF, the de facto authority

It is clear that the RSF do not have plans in place to deal with the people in the areas they control. When RSF officers met with citizens in an attempt to win them over and invite them to help restore services such as water and electricity, they responded that their priority was security, which was not available. The plundering of empty homes, mostly by armed individuals allied with the RSF, did not stop. Other times, RSF soldiers themselves caused problems, stealing people’s property. This happened in our neighbourhood while I was there.

When we protested to the commanders, they claimed that there were “unruly people” and that the RSF prohibited such practices. They usually added that preoccupation with these matters would come at the expense of confronting “the enemy” at the front lines. As for the soldiers, if they were frank, they would say had not received salaries in months!

The RSF coming from the countryside and the desert vary in their dealings with people. Many of them, especially the officers, generally treat women and the elderly with respect and a degree of integrity, but some others seek to show that they are in control of the situation, sometimes in an arbitrary and exaggerated ways. The RSF use the Arabic word jahiziya (readiness) as a greeting, for example, when crossing the checkpoints, and refer to the army as “the enemy”.

The motivations of the RSF leadership are well-known: they are fighting for power. Yet, when asked about their motivations for joining the RSF, it becomes clear that what unites the soldiers is developmental injustice, considering the rural and pastoral areas from which they came. Some of them speak sincerely, even though most have no education, about the neglect of and poverty in their areas they come from, despite the resources and economic potential in these areas.

Other motives are related to local conflicts. Some RSF members also spoke about the existential threat facing their ethnic groups as other tribes are perceived as stronger. It seems that the motive of these people is to train and arm themselves and perhaps have the RSF on their side when they need to defend their group.

Certainly, material motives are also not absent. Although some of the RSF personnel I met were university graduates, and one was even a university professor, the majority of the soldiers whom I got to know had no education or only basic education. Some of them say said that since they opened their eyes to life, they only had war raging above their heads. The common expression among the eloquent among them was that they learned in the school of life. Service in Yemen is considered a preferential advantage and a source of pride and importance.

The underdevelopment of their home areas and their poverty, combined with the absence of or only a few personal qualifications other than carrying weapons has pushed them to joining the RSF. Therefore, the RSF represent, for many, perhaps the majority of the fighters, a job opportunity, and a source of livelihood, whether through the salaries or the spoils they obtain in military operations. Everyone I met during my many trips during my stay, whether at checkpoints, markets, or even in the hospitals to which the RSF transfer their wounded – were all Sudanese.

In my opinion, the discourse that depicts the current enemy as an ‘invading force’ from outside Sudan, is based on the ‘Arab diaspora’ narrative (Arab Ashtaat, which means lost nomadic Arab tribes without land living along the fringes of Africa Sahel zone), and only perpetuates the societal divisions in the country. This narrative was promoted by members of the National Salvation regime [1989-2019] to absolve the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood of any responsibility for what happened and is still happening in Sudan.

A night in RSF detention

For reasons unknown to me to this day, but reminiscent of NCP regime practices, RSF soldiers detained me in late February, a month, and a half after I returned home, and two and a half months after I arrived in Khartoum. It was sunset, and I was in the house, reading, when I heard commotion in the street and went out to find out what it was. I found a combat vehicle mounted with a Dushka machine gun, and men armed with Kalashnikovs, outside the house. They shouted at me, telling me to get into the vehicle.

I was shocked because I had returned home with the knowledge and even encouragement of the neighbourhood’s RSF security guards present near the house, as I mentioned earlier. These security guards all knew me from my daily walks to the bakery in the neighbourhood. Anyway, I insisted on returning inside and putting on a jalabiya over my pants. A middle-aged man, who seemed to be their leader, allowed me on a condition that I bring my telephone with me. A number of them entered with me, some carrying their weapons, where I put on the jalabiya and took some my medicines with me. They did not allow me to lock up the house. They blindfolded me and put me into the car, where I found the young man who was living with me in the house also blindfolded.

The car went at a crazy speed. When it stopped, they pushed us into an unfurnished cell with two other people. It was so small that it was hardly possible for the four of us to stretch out our legs at the same time. After about two hours, the door opened, and an armed guard called us out, and led us to a place in front of a multi-story building under construction, where several people were sitting in a circle with chairs and beds with mosquito nets on them. They made the young man who had been with me sit on the ground and brought me a chair. Soon, someone who appeared to be the commander arrived and began questioning the young man, asking him, among other things, why he had been staying with me.

After he finished interrogating him, the man turned to me and asked me if I had known this young man before. I replied that I had only met him in person in Khartoum a short time ago, but that we had been corresponding for years because he was part of a reading group within a programme, we ran in the Democratic Thought Project, which has many groups across Sudan. Here, two others whose faces I could not see in the dark place, interrupted, telling the interrogator that what I was saying was true and that they were also members of reading groups in their area.

The interrogation stopped there, but while I was given a bed to spend the night, the young man was returned to the cell. The next morning, the two young men took me home, without telling me the reason for my detention. The young man who was staying with me, was released three days later.

Wishing the war would stop

During the first days of the war, most Sudanese and certainly also residents of our neighbourhood expected the fighting to end quickly. Several of them believed what the leaders of the Sudanese army said in the early days of the war: that the armed forces would quickly resolve the situation and eliminate the RSF. I did meet a person, with a military background, who disagreed saying that an air force alone cannot resolve a military battle. Infantry, which the army scarcely had, is also needed.

After my return, during my second stay in war-torn Khartoum, it was clear that those who had remained in Khartoum or returned to it were exhausted by the prolonged war. As the communications network was cut off, information about the progress of military operations was monopolised by army radio stations: the Sudanese Radio, My Country Radio, and the Voice of the Armed Forces, which some people listened to on their telephones if they were able to find a neighbour with a solar-powered device from which they could charge it.

Confidence in the army’s ability to win had greatly diminished. It even became a source of mockery. Most people’s hopes were pinned on the negotiations in Jeddah, although many doubted the army’s intention to stop the war through negotiations and believed that ‘the Islamists’, would not allow it.

Aborted plans and leaving Khartoum

The first month after I arrived in Khartoum was spent trying to get the house ready. In the second month, I managed to get some of the project books and the Reading for Change series out of the office. Both floors of the office were destroyed, and those books and some large furniture were all that remained. It was not possible to reach the area in which the rest of the books were stored, as the building outside was teeming with dozens of drunk armed men, and it was not wise to bother them.

By the end of the second month, the telecommunications networks had been cut off, as had traffic across the bridges to Omdurman. As a result, there was no longer a means of communication through which to establish the “Stuck in Khartoum Platform,” which we were thinking of as a forum to reflect the conditions of the people there.

The effort was limited to trying to help the young people supervising the neighbourhood kitchens, and in some cases elderly patients, as much as possible. Meanwhile, I tried to prepare my living room as a public library for the youth and explore the possibility of creating more libraries in other neighbourhoods.

As the days passed, especially with the onset of the scorching hot months of April and May, stress increased day after day. There was a shortage of water for days. Nighttime burglaries increased, targeting the few solar panels left on roofs. At the end of April, around 7:00 in the morning, I noticed that my small fan stopped rotating, which was unusual at this time because the solar batteries usually recharge before running out.

The young electrician who was supervising the solar power system came and thought that the wind might have moved the panels, so he went up to the roof where the solar panels were, only to find that they had all disappeared.

I remained in Khartoum for the whole of May, with an entirely different daily schedule. It was no longer possible to stay in the inner part of the house, day or night, because of the intense heat. The hours of reading and writing during the day were reduced and diminished more at night. Of course, I had to give up my plans for setting up home libraries.

In late May, a passenger bus similar to the one that carried me from the Police Bridge in Wad Madani about six months earlier, took us on a multi-day journey from Mayo neighbourhood in southern Khartoum, but this time heading south via Rabak and Al Jebelain in White Nile state, towards the Joda crossing point at the border with South Sudan, and to Renk. Scenes almost identical to those on the first trip from Wad Madani were repeated, but in reverse: from the RSF checkpoints to army ones, with one difference: after more than a year since the outbreak of the war, the road was more miserable, desolate, and dangerous.

---

* Khartoum’s Southern Belt is part of the periphery of the capital inhabited by people earlier displaced by wars in Darfur, Kordofan, and Blue Nile region and South Sudanese refugees, and by impoverished farmers from various parts of the country who lost their lands to banks. (Explanation by RD)

** Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Declaration, translated by Ammar Jamal (Khartoum, Democratic Thought Project, 2020), pp. 24–25.