My problem(s) with Higleig

Last week, the South Sudanese army entered Higleig, an area in Sudan's South Kordofan state and took total control of it and still controls it as we speak even though Sudan's army claims to be "20 km" and " a few hours" away from "liberating Higleig".

Surely, every Sudanese person was quick to condemn the SPLM for occupying Higleig and they have the right to, since Higleig , as far as we know, is part of Sudan (even though if the citizens of South Kordofan were given the right to hold a self-determination referendum, they would gladly want to become part of South Sudan).

I think before we quickly decide to side with the Sudanese government and the national army for their attempts at taking back a piece of our territory, we should try to understand why this happened in the first place.

-For weeks, the Sudanese air forces bombed Bentiu, the capital of Unity state in South Sudan. As much as they deny it, there is solid proof that they did. hmmmmm....Why would they do that? I think they were just trying to provoke the SPLM. If this is the case, then lets try to understand why.

-As the SPLM was moving towards Higleig, the army forces stationed there were communicating with the leadership of the army and updating them on the situation. The leadership in Khartoum refused to give the forces in Higleig the green light to take action. So, they just sat there and did nothing , until they clashed with the SPLM. I'm not saying that the forces there were powerful enough to stop the advancing SPLM forces, but why were they stopped from taking action?

Jihad Comes to Town

The call for Jihad is everywhere in Khartoum and it is sickening. In newspapers, you see the adverts and you also see posters around the city. Students affiliated with the ruling party are even beating students at universities into submission to... Jihad. (side note: Shouldn't one actually want to go to Jihad? When did Jihad become by force?)

The GOS knows very well that Sudan can not afford this war. The country is drained and it turns out that after South Sudan seceded with 80% of Sudan's oil revenues, the government doesn't have a Plan B. Just ask them about agriculture and they wouldn't even know what to say.

But the point is, the GOS has one aim in life- to stay in power- and it it would do anything to remain in power and this is where it all starts to make sense.

When you are losing popularity and your people can't stand you and are blaming you for everything ( increasing prices/ expensive houses etc), you need to get them on your side. If you can't get them on your side, why not use the "patriotism" card?
And it is working on some level. In the sense that we are all condemning it and supporting the government in their attempts at reclaiming back our "occupied lands" !!!!

On another note, I don't remember South Sudan ever making noise about "Higleig" being part of South Sudan before…why now? Abyei was always contested between the two countries, but Higleig was not. The two countries even went to court over Abyei.
The thing is, South Sudan is pissed off. They shut down their oil production to piss off Sudan because they can not agree on oil transit fees and they will never agree as long as Sudan is asking for so much money.

Higleig is where most of Sudan's oil comes from , so why should Sudan have a stable oil supply while South Sudan can not?

I have so many questions *sigh*

40 days ago, Awadia Ajabna was killed by Sudan's police

Last week, the death of Awadia Ajabna, a young woman living in Al-Daim  shook Khartoum and the entire country as her relatives and angry youth took to the streets and protested. In a country where human life is cheap and 1.5 million died in the civil war and hundreds of thousands died in Darfur and otherplaces, it was interesting to see how one woman managed to capture the attention of a capital where the majority are apathetic to the suffering in the Sudan outside Central Sudan. 

Why did Awadia Ajabna become a national cause even more than the Manasir protest that went on for over 100 days?

Its surely not because she is a celebrity. Awadia worked in a kindergarten and came from a family that hails from the embattled Nuba Mountains, a periphery within a periphery. Two years ago, she ran in the national elections to represent Al Daim, the neighborhood she lives in, as part of the Sudanese National Labour Party. She was loved by her family and respected by her neighbors, but the way she died became the main source of anger and frustration.

According to her sister, the Public Order Police were patrolling the neighborhood. This police force is notorious and is known for using vague laws to extort money from men and women , they are despised in Sudan. Their main aim is to fight social corruption and they can arrest women for "indecent" clothing and men suspected of consuming alcohol.

Naturally, the meaning of indecent clothing is unclear and it is based on the opinion of the arresting officer. As they patrolled next to the Ajabna house, they stopped her brother and accused him of  being drunk. He was allegedly speaking on the phone and they most probably wanted to bully him into taking his phone as a compromise. The brother in question argued with them when things  heated up, the police forces retreated , but came back larger in number and armed. It remains unclear whether they raided the house, but what we are sure of is that Awadia was shot in the middle of a chaotic situation where a number of officers opened fire on her family and neighbors who are unarmed civilians.

She was killed by the public order police forces. When someone is shot in the head, you can not but say that this was a deliberate act.

Today, Amal Abbas, the veteran journalist and editor, writes in Al-Sahafa that " it is not strange that a civilian dies in front of her house in light of a regime that for two decades has enabled the culture of war and incriminated the other especially women in the practices of the public order police," 

It is also not strange that the public order police is armed. For years, it has degraded women in Sudan by restricting their dress and appearances in the public life and subjected them to public lashings. In 2010, right before the international day for human rights, a video appeared of a woman being lashed, violently.

Toni Morisson, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in Newsweek Magazine, that she has seen "many instances of human brutality, but this one was particularly harrowing."
Morisson went on to describe how proud the woman in this video made her feel. She wrote "after each cut of the lash into your flesh, you tried to stand; you raised your body up like a counter-whip. It so moved me to see your reactions; I interpreted them as glimmers of hope, of principled defiance."

Only two years ago, the public order police killed another woman. Nadia Saboon, a simple tea lady was trying to make ends meet in a market in Khartoum. The public order police attacked the tea sellers and poor traders in the area in what is described as a "sweep". She ran for her life, but fell onto a metal stake and bled to death. Saboon died , but her story was not as publicized as Awadia's ordeal.

The difference is, this is the first documented time the public order police kills a woman in the safety of her house, in her comfort zone. 

Awadia's death inspired many protests. For days, youth protested on Sahafa street and inside Al-Daim. They held banners saying that "Awadia is a matryr. They said they want retribution. 

Protestors burned the public order police station in Al-Daim. They say that Ethiopians and tea ladies living there are particularly happy as the police officers working there used to blackmail them and subject them to humiliating abuses. 
The area was turned into a military zone. Police cars and trucks full of armored police officers caught my attention on my way to the funeral. 

The tear-gas was very intense inside alleys. People in Al-Daim say that an old grandmother died as a result of the intense tear-gas. A young girl studying at Sudan University called Omnia is currently being hospitalized as the tear gas bomb hit her on the head during the protest.

I'm particularly fond of Amal Abbas's daily column a few weeks ago, she ended it by saying that " let the events of Al-Daim be a trigger towards total change."

Published: Juba and Khartoum defiant over Contested Territory

South Sudan President Salva Kiir. FILE | AFRICA REVIEW |
By MACHEL AMOS in Juba and REEM ABBAS in Khartoum

Posted Thursday, April 12 2012 at 15:05 @ http://bit.ly/J6w2yr

The possibility of Sudan and South Sudan returning to war looked more real Friday as both sides remained defiant over a contested oil-rich region.

South Sudan President Salva Kiir ruled out withdrawal from Heglig, as Khartoum vowed to fight a "war of dignity" with the former to reclaim the lost territory.

South Sudan took control of Heglig from Sudanese forces on Tuesday in fresh clashes with the Khartoum Armed Forces.

The UN and the African Union have called for South Sudan's immediate withdrawal from Heglig.

President Kiir said Khartoum took it as a military weakness when he ordered the troops to refrain from overrunning Heglig last month.


It was not. But we always believed that everything could be resolved by peaceful means, President Kiir stressed.

This time, I said that I would not order the forces to withdraw, said the President, amid applause from a packed House.

He said the decision was not because South Sudan was interested in war, but only wanted to resolve the problem once and for all.

In Khartoum, the minister for Defence, Mr Abdel-Rahim Mohamed Hussein, said that the conflict was part of a plot to "overthrow the regime".

"Taking over the oil-fields is the first step, to be followed by taking over a key town in Southern Kordofan, then taking over Khartoum," he told parliament.

Heglig is part of South Kordofan State where a rebellion against the Khartoum government has raged since last June.

However, the area was also contested with South Sudan because the latter believed that in the 1956 border demarcation, Heglig was part of its Unity State.

Sudan denies the claims and has vowed to reclaim what it considers to be occupied territories.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, in a phone call on Wednesday, urged President Kiir to order his forces to withdraw immediately.

The UN Secretary General gave me an order to immediately withdraw from Heglig. I said I am not under your command, Kiir said, attracting applause.

Withdraw troops

President Kiir accused UN and the international community of being unfair in handling the matters between the two neighbouring states.

Whatever aerial bombardments were being conducted in South Sudan were a violation of our sovereignty. When we report them to the international community, they don't take it as something that concerns them, President Kiir said, arguing that whenever Juba took a step in self-defence, it became a matter of international concern.

"You are not doing justice to all of us," said the South Sudan leader.

"You want to see justice done to Sudan and not South Sudan, and this is unfair."

President Kiir also warned that if his Sudan counterpart Hassan Al-Bashir did not withdraw troops from Abyei, despite international calls to do so, Juba would reconsider it position and possibly return to the contested region.

Meanwhile, Sudan intensified aerial bombardments on Thursday, dropping four rounds of bombs in Bentiu, the capital of Unity State.

Unity State Information minister Gideon Gatpan said a SAF warplane hovered over the area in the morning and dropped the bombs on Rubkona County.

He said the target was oilfields. The army spokesman, Col Philip Aguer, confirmed the bombing, accusing Sudan of provoking a meaningless fighting.

Sudan TV stated Wednesday in a news broadcast that many youths had come forward to join the armed forces to get back their country's lost territory.

In another development, a Sudanese parliamentarian has donated $374,000 (1 million pounds) to support the war efforts against South Sudan.

Sudan has filed a complaint against South Sudan at the UN Security Council and asked the Security Council to pressure Juba into retreating from its territory.

"Sudan has full rights in international law and UN documents to respond to this attack on Sudan's peace and unity," said Khartoum's UN ambassador Dafallah Al-Haj Ali

A presidential aide, Mr Abdel-Rahman Al Mahdi; said that "Sudan will not fold its hands while Heglig is occupied and will work to get back its territories that were raped as an act of self defence".

Published: Sudan continues crackdown on voices of dissent

Published @ http://ch16.org/2012/02/02/sudan-continues-crackdown-on-voices-of-dissent/

KHARTOUM : The National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) arrested twelve youth activists from the popular groups, Girifna (We are Fed Up) and Youth for Change over the last week in the Sudanese Capital Khartoum. Other members of Girifna are reportedly being pursued by security officials.

There has been shrinking space for freedom of expression since Arab Spring uprisings in neighbouring North African nations began in late 2010. The government of Sudan has tightened the noose on youth and opposition groups that are calling for change as well as cracked down on independent media. Since July 2011, 8 newspapers have been suspended by the security forces. Only two English newspapers are surviving in Sudan as five newspapers were suspended after the South Sudan secession in 2011.

Some newspapers like Rai Al Shab and Ahjras Al Hurriya were suspended for their affiliation with opposition parties while others Alwan, an independent newspaper was shut down under unclear circumstances.

Many opposition parties have members in detention. Dr. Bushra Gamar and Dr. Abdelmoniem Rahma, both from Sudan People’s Liberation Movement -North Faction (SPLM-N), a movement currently prohibited in Sudan, have been in detention since June and September, respectively.

Taj Al Sir Gaafar, a student at the University of Khartoum who belongs to the opposition movement, HAQ, has been in detention since December 2011. Calls for the release of the detainees have not yielded much action from President Omar Al Bashir’s government.

Since early 2011 when the Arab Spring began, opposition groups have publicly called for regime-change as the only way forward for Sudan. President Bashir who heads the current ruling party, the National Congress Party, came to power in 1989 after staging a military coup and overthrowing a democratically-elected government. Since then, Sudan has been embroiled in violent conflicts.

Currently Bashir’s government is fighting different rebel groups in different parts of the country. The government has also been accused of mismanaging billions of oil revenues. Sudan began exporting oil in the late 1990s, although a number of high-rise buildings were added to Khartoum’s skyline, little has changed for the majority of Sudanese citizens.

In January and February 2011 hundreds of Sudanese youth participated in an unprecedented wave of street demonstrations. It is estimated that at least 113 were arrested during those protests; some detainees including Girifna members reported abuse during detention. The youth were released, but some ahve reportedly been under surveillance after their release to monitor their political activities.

Khartoum has also seen protests against the alarming increase in commodity prices. The protests against high prices have spread to Kassala, a city in Eastern Sudan, where students held mass protests but faced a brutal crackdown far away from the national and international media eye.

In late 2011 there was a boycott on meat as people looked for different ways to beat the government crack down. Supermarkets that have previously had all products began stocking up on basic commodities and lessening their purchase of products now seen as luxury such as jam and tuna.

Sudan also faces continued protest by the Manasir, an ethnic group from Northern Sudan who have held a sit-in in River Nile State against displacement and lack of compensation as a result of the construction of the Merowe dam. The dam was built on Manasir land and directly displaced thousands of ethnic Manasir.

The government of Sudan defends the dam and is currently building two other controversial dams as an attempt to boost electricity supply to all parts of Sudan. Power cuts remain a daily reality for the 40 million citizens of Sudan. With all these protests the government has increased its highhandedness.


Students of Zalingei University (West Darfur) demonstrating in December 2010.

A Sudanese youth whom I spoke to but cannot mention because of their safety said they have been targeted.

” My friend and I ran out of his house when we noticed two cars parked outside. We ran down small alleyways while the cars tried to catch up with us,” said A.S who was forced to leave his house for security reasons on Friday. A.S also had to stop using his phone as it is bugged and could be used to track his movements.

Another female member of Girifna reported that her phone was bugged and her house is under constant surveillance by the NISS.

“When I went home after Wednesday’s event, I found an NISS vehicle and officers watching my house,” said R.S.

Members of the NISS are immune to trials and can detain activists for up to 9 months on the pretext of defending national security. Cases of torture were reported inside NISS premises, which are usually government-owned houses in residential neighborhoods.

This followed held on January 25 to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the Port Sudan massacre where at least 22 were killed and over 400 were injured following clashes between security and protestors asking for an end to the marginalization of Eastern Sudan. The event featured speakers from East Sudan to speak about the ongoing humanitarian crises and neglect there. Girifna has been working for change in Sudan since 2009.

All those detainees do not know their fate until a decision is taken by government and in some cases they are forced to sign documents promising to stop their political activities before release. In other cases, they have to go to court for charges ranging from public nuisance to conspiring against the state and cases usually drag on for a few months.

Commentators have asked when will the Arab spring reach Sudan, which is well, qualified looking at political and economic problems and ongoing humanitarian crises. The important question is not when the revolution will reach Sudan but in what form would it reach.

Last year, rebel groups from Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile and even East Sudan joined forced and created the Sudan Revolutionary Front, which calls for an armed struggle to overthrow the government as an alternative. Although people in Central and Northern Sudan are keen on regime-change, there is still a divide between the advantaged Central and Northern Sudan and the marginalized other parts on how to bring about regime change.

Change in Sudan is inevitable, protests are ongoing but until Sudanese people from different groups unite, the government will continue to easily crash dissent and pit groups against others.

ام الناس- محمــد طـه القدال

The wonderful Mohamed Taha Al Gaddal, one of my favorite Sudanese poets wrote yet another masterpiece, Om Al Nas (the mother of the people). I managed to get the CD last week in an event in commemoration of "the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence"

You can now listen to Om Al Nas performed in the form of 4 different songs by Amal Al Nour and Asrar Babiker and others.

اوبريت ام الناس عمل من انتاج مركز سالمة لمصادر ودراسات المرأة صندوق الامم المتحده لدعم المرأة حركه تمكين المرأه من اجل السلام
اوبريت ام الناس من كلمانت الاستاذ محمد طه القدال
الحان وتوزيع موسيقي الاستاذ سعد الدين


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zZ5YmIOpz4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USsA3k9Gu7Y

Pain for Beauty: the Dilemma of Facial Cutting in Sudan

This post is part of the series ‘Culture and Human Rights: Challenging Cultural Excuses for Gender-Based Violence’ hosted by Gender Across Borders and Violence Is Not Our Culture.

In a spacious house in Fetihab, a neighborhood in the city of Omdurman in Khartoum state, Soad Al -Tijani, a widow in her 70s recounts her traumatizing experience to her grandchildren and me, a journalist and the daughter of her niece.

She is telling us the story of her facial cuts. Every few minutes she stops her tale to underscore how lucky we are to be born in the contemporary world where practices such as facial cuts have vanished. She was not so lucky. Her round face bares three deep cuts on each cheek.

Facial cuts are common in some Sudanese tribes. In the North, many women were subjected to this practice until it began dying out in the 1950s.

The cuts are different from tribe to tribe. The most common kind is the one-eleven (111) cuts on both cheeks.

Women glorified facial cutting and they believed that it enhanced beauty and that is why the prettier and chubbier women were cut before others.

At the tender age of 9, Soad was taken by her aunt to undergo facial cuts or “sholouk” as they are called in Sudan.

“I was made to lie down while a very large woman was sitting cross-legged on the floor and holding my head on her lap, two were holding my arms so I wouldn’t move and one was sitting on a stool ontop of my chest,” recalls Soad.

She couldn’t turn her face or move any part of her body. She was still as the woman on the stool cut both cheeks with a razor.

“The razor was very large and looked like a nail clipper, they literally dig the skin out of each cut, ” said Soad.

Her grandchildren and I were disgusted by the ordeal and continued bombarding her with questions. The youngest in the room, Mustafa, is still in high school and did not utter a single word. When I asked him what he thought, he said that he agreed with me that women were subjected to a lot of pain.

“No better word describes facial cutting other than the word crime,” said Soad interrupting our loud discussion.

According to Soad, her mother was too scarred to take a strong stance against her powerful aunt. When her young daughter was brought home with a swollen face and neck, the mother couldn’t look at her for weeks.

“They dipped cotton in a black liquid and placed it on my face to stop the bleeding and my mother took me to my aunt’s house for weeks to reapply fresh cotton,” said Soad who said that her father was also against it.

Family and societal pressure is strong in Sudan. In the past it was worse with extended families living in one house. A child was seen as belonging to the whole family. Even though Soad’s father was against facial cutting, he told her to ask for thinner and less deep cuts as a compromise. But when the women came to cut her face, she couldn’t negotiate with them and ended up with the most severe and deep kind of cuts.

Her eldest brother, a journalist and writer was completely against the practice. He didn’t talk to their parents for three days as punishment.

Facial scarring is very rare in contemporary Sudan. Most women who were subjected to it are either deceased or are at least in their 60s and few young women abide by it. Perceptions about beauty have dramatically changed over the last decades, modern Sudanese women would never imagine being facially cut.

“I never thought about doing it to my daughters,” said Soad.

Soad is proof that culture can and does change.

Sudanese youth arm themselves with art to bring change

Published @ Onislam.net http://www.onislam.net/english/culture-and-entertainment/music/451920-fight-the-cause-sudanese-youth-singing-for-change.html

Sudan Eyez: Fight the Cause , a mix-tape that includes 14 tracks by different Sudanese musicians and poets couldn't have been produced at a more perfect time. While fight the cause was being widely circulated on Facebook and downloaded for free, a wave of political awareness was spreading amongst Sudanese youth.

Young men and women were putting Safia Ishaq, an activist who was gang-rapped by Sudanese security forces as their display picture and many were joining groups calling for changes a la Tunisia and Egypt. In its introduction, the mix-tape emphasizes that the battle for the Sudanese cause has been ongoing for 21 years and the movement towards change started on January the 30th 2011 was "inspired by the Egyptian and Tunisian youth."

By asking the listeners to make this CD the soundtrack of the 2011 Sudanese revolution, the artists are actively trying to mobilize their listeners to become active and involved in the movement. The mix tape begins with a 1958 recording broadcasted from Omdurman Radio which was called "This is Omdurman" at the time.

The recording was two years after Sudan's independence from Great Britain and the year of its first military coup. Music from old Sudanese songs is sampled and integrated into a number of tracks. It covers different genres from hip-hop by US-based Sudanese rapper and poet, Selma-I and Khartoum-based rappers, ReZOULution to Reggae beats by Mao and R n B by Dubai-based Sudanese artist, Mo'awia known as Nile. Featured artists easily alternate between English and Arabic and insert cultural references such as referring to the government as Kozes, a cup made of metal used for drinking water in Sudan.
The artists began working on the CD after the January 30 protests and the whole idea was instigated by the arrest of rapper, blogger, activist and poet Ahmad Mahmoud also known as DZA the Dissenter. 70 protesters were arrested on the 30th of January protest. Two days later, Mahmoud was arrested as he took part in a peaceful protest in Khartoum North.

Hashim , the brain behind the idea said that the aim was to produce a mixtape “ that is going to inspire the Sudanese youth so they can’t let us down when it’s the right time to make some changes,”

Picking the contributors wasn’t a challenge for Hashim, he already had a few musicians in mind. He made sure to pick the tracks that match the concept of the album. He told me in an interview over Facebook that he knew that the musicians wouldn’t mind joining such an album even if it is going to bring them problems.

The tracks were already recorded, Hisham just had to pick the most suitable ones. He started working on the mixtape and was planning to dedicate it to Ahmad Mahmoud, his fellow musician and good friend. Fortunately, he was released twelve long days later.
In the meantime, the youth movements in Sudan decided that 21st of March was a day of mass protests. The mixtape had to be finished and distributed beforehand.

“I really wanted that album to spread awareness so I had to publish it unfinished, after all, it took me about one month to collect the pieces,” he stated.

The mixtape was distributed online. Many put a link to it on their Facebook page. I personally stumbled upon the mixtape after a friend of mine posted a link to it on Facebook. When I asked Hashim if they used the internet only for distributing the mixtape, he quoted the poet and musician, Gil Scott-Heron and told me that “the revolution will not be televised,”
Reminiscent of the role of Facebook and twitter in Tunisia and Egypt, he added that the revolution is not televised, but it is internized,”


G. AbuNafeesa, a medical doctor found herself part of the artistic movement calling for change when she read about what happened to Safia Ishaq, a 25 year old artist affiliated with Girfna, a two-year old youth movement calling for change. Ishaq was arrested on 13 February 2011 by the police for her involvement in the January 30 movement. Not long after she was released, she spoke out about her arrest , beating and subsequent gang-rape by three members of Sudan’s security service in a video testimony broadcasted on youtube.
AbuNafeesa was heartbroken and angry by the oppression of women in Sudan and the ongoing violence against civilians and decided to use her pen to write the story of the Sudanese struggle.
In her piece, the quality of equality, performed at the Women’s Week at Ahfad University for Women in Sudan, she spoke of Ishaq when she said
“You asked for the quality of your equality, And gained nothing but cold depravity…of ones who crowned your head with fear
when they unwrapped your hijab, and bound your hands -
because you chose to make a stand!”

AbuNafeesa has used Ishaq’s picture as her facebook display picture for nearly 2 months now.

Police Violence Alert

The last text message I read before getting on the plane to Cairo was from a young student doing research in Sudan, he told me about protests at the University of Khartoum. I asked him to email me more information.

Just thought I should share the email.


"From what I was able to gather from a professor and a student who were on campus, protests erupted at the student hostel and a police crackdown ensued. The protesters, who were primarily Darfuri students, rejected the university's deadline to vacate the premises for the holidays on the grounds that travel to and from Darfur during the holidays is both costly and dangerous. The number of students involved, or possibly detained, in addition to the size of the police force that responded to the protests was unknown by those with whom I spoke. However, the professor, who was administering an exam on the main campus, was able to smell tear gas. The incident began around 10 am and was contained by 11 am,"

I don't understand why the police reacts to any protest no matter how small it is with "tear gas"!

Documenting Earlier Abuses

This month, three journalists are facing trial for writing about Safia Ishaq's gang-rape by security agents in Khartoum last February.

Amal Habbani's trial is on the 9th of June.
Omer Al-Garrai is on the 21st of June, and Faisal Mohammed is the 28th of June.

Support them by campaigning for them and attending their trials!

To give you some background, I wrote this in Feburary.

Sudanese people have never before witnessed the extent of these abuses. In the last two decades, thousands have been subjected to disabling torture at the hands of intelligence officers and security men in what have came to be known as ghost houses. These are two of the many stories:

Marwa Al Tijani, an Arts student at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, begins, “I was arrested at 4 p.m., my friends and I started walking away from the protest after security officials cracked down on the protesters and started arresting people. Out of nowhere, a normal car pulls up in front of us and two men wearing civilian attire came out of the car and one of them pointed a gun to my face and asked us to get in the car.”

This is the story of Marwa Al Tijani, an Arts student at the University of Khartoum in Sudan.

Al-Tijani was arrested on 3 February in a protest in Bahri in north of the Sudanese capital. When she arrived at the police station, insults were hurdled at her and she was savagely whipped while she was interrogated about her tribe, her family, and living conditions.

Al-Tijani remembers hearing the loud screams of men in nearby cells as they were beaten with whips and canes: “I saw a young man named Ahmed. They shaved his hair off and they were making fun of him as they beat him mercilessly.” Although she did not know Ahmed, she could not stop crying as she heard him scream out of pain in the next room. "They beat him for over an hour and kept telling me that he deserves it," she remembers.

Then they brought a badly-beaten Ahmed into her interrogation room,and one of the men said, “This is the man you are romantically and sexually involved with.”

Marwa continues, “They used such explicit sexual terms. I couldn’t even look at him, his body was covered in wounds. They kept saying, 'Look at him , he is weak and scared, do you still want him?'"

Marwa had never met Ahmed, but they were arrested at the same protest. This was enough for a connection between them in the eyes of the security men. “They proceeded to ask me about our relationship and they kept focusing on our sexual relationship. They kept insulting me and Ahmed, you can’t even imagine what they said. I didn’t say a word, but Ahmed fought back after each and every word they said to us,” Marwa recalls.

The ordeal continued until very late: "At 2 a.m., I was released after they made sign a document stating that I would not take part in any protests."

Although the government denies "ghost houses" exist, the Sudanese President of Sudan, in a slip of tongue in May 2009 during talks with journalists, confirmed they exist. Activists have been died there, including Ali Fadol, Mohammed Abdel Salam, and Abd Al Moniem Salman.

I knew Ali Fadol. He was arrested an hour after he returned home from a party my parents threw for me. His hair, strand by strand, was plucked out of his scalp. His body was so badly deformed that the state would not hand over his corpse to his family.

Ali Mohamed Osman, a politically active student of Economics at the University of Khartoum, was arrested on 14 February in Omdurman along with two members of the Umma National Party. He was tortured by six men for an entire day before his release.

A Facebook group by the name of “The Popular Uprising” has tried to organise mass protests, but police forces so far have surrounded marchers and arrested dozens. Amongst the detained were the two sons of Mubarak Al-Fadil, a well-known Sudanese opposition leader, and many students not affiliated with any party.

The security forces are now on a binge. The National Intelligence Security Service (NISS), the notorious force known for its human rights violations, has the authority to arbitrarily detain any Sudanese citizen indefinitely without trial. All members of the NISS have immunity from getting prosecution.

One more story: Safia Ishag, a graduate of Fine Art and an activist was kidnapped this in front of her house in Khartoum. At the headquarters of the NISS, she was gang-rapped by three officers before she was dumped on a road in Northern Khartoum. When the hospital's rape report was presented to a police station, it was rejected with the demand that she be examined by the doctor at the police hospital.

Amnesty International and Domestic Violence

Amnesty International doesn't only expose atrocities worldwide, they also have a new unique interactive billboard. Looking at it, you see a happy couple, when you look away, the image changes to one of domestic violence. 

This is what happens all over the world, domestic violence happens behind closed doors, we don't see it. so we don't always acknowledge it's existence.

Great job Amnesty International.