Sudan's Capital Offers Relative Freedom

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- An ambitious young man from the conflict-plagued region of Darfur, Zacaria Adam leads a carefully calibrated life in Sudan's sprawling capital.

He goes to work most mornings at the Ministry of Culture and Information, biting his tongue if talk turns to Darfur, where government militias burned his village to the ground. In the afternoons, he attends university lectures on political systems, telling himself that education, rather than rebellion, will best serve his people.

And in the evenings, he heads home to Fur Quarter, a bustling neighborhood named for its residents from Darfur's ethnic Fur community.

"You imagine my brother in the camp in Darfur," Adam, 30, said, sitting in his 10-by-10-foot, dirt-floored room furnished with twin beds and a ceiling fan. "He has no electricity, no water. He is suffering from the heat. Here, we are lucky."

It is a relative sort of luck that Darfurians experience in Khartoum, where they have migrated by the hundreds of thousands in recent decades and now constitute perhaps a third of the population. Tens of thousands more have arrived since 2003, when a brutal government counterinsurgency campaign was started in Darfur. By some estimates, it has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced more than 2.7 million.

But the life and times of Darfurians in Khartoum -- where they live in slums and middle-class enclaves and work as engineers, street-side tea sellers and even government bureaucrats -- offer a more complex portrait.

Although Darfurians in Darfur have been subjected to extreme government brutality, those in Khartoum say the government generally treats them with a kind of liberating indifference.

"In Darfur, people are controlled by the government's system," said Abdirahman Osman, a tailor and Fur leader with no love for the government. "Here, we're like any other Sudanese."

'We Have Another Life'

Khartoum has a Big Brother-ish air about it, with images of a smiling President Omar Hassan al-Bashir plastered on banners, billboards and windshield sunscreens. The images have proliferated around town since the International Criminal Court indicted him on war-crimes charges in March.

With the conflict still festering, Darfurians here live with the constant threat of the national security forces. After an unprecedented rebel assault on the capital last year, for instance, security agents jailed several hundred Darfurians on suspicion of aiding the attack. And, in general, anyone who speaks out against Bashir is monitored, perhaps arrested and tortured, critics say.

But despite such repressive actions, many Darfurians -- even families of some prominent Darfur rebel leaders -- lead hassle-free lives in Khartoum.

Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar and director of the Social Science Research Council in Boston, said one reason Bashir's party is not threatened by Darfurians in its midst is that the rebels have failed to organize urbanites into a political party or mobilize large-scale demonstrations of the sort that have helped topple previous Sudanese governments.

Instead, rebel leaders have defined their struggle as that of the marginalized, rural periphery vs. the wealthier, urban center. As a result, many Darfurians in Khartoum and other urban areas are not politically involved in the Darfur struggle.

This is especially true of Darfurians such as Adam, who arrived here before the war.

Like thousands of rural Sudanese who moved to Khartoum in the 1970s and '80s, members of Adam's family came seeking better jobs and a decent education. Like most Darfurians here, they often traveled back to their villages to visit relatives, most of whom now live in camps.

But after 20 years in Khartoum, Adam sees himself less as an aggrieved Darfurian than as a cosmopolitan intellectual.

"People come here because they think they can have a better future," said Adam, who at one point was supporting seven relatives who had moved out of the camps to the city. "Here, in Khartoum, you can have almost whatever life you want. . . . You are evaluated more as an individual."

His government job has its limitations. He has been passed over for promotions for years, which he attributes not to his being from Darfur, per se, but to his speaking against the ruling party as a student leader at his university.

Outside of work, Adam said, he feels as free or oppressed as anyone else in this city. In a way, he said, Khartoum's residents are equal in their exclusion from a tiny ruling elite.

At the end of the day, staring at the ceiling fan in his room, Adam said he often thinks of relatives back in the camps and fends off a sense of guilt. "I feel so very sorry," he said. "Those of us in Khartoum, we have another life."

Some Room to Grow

Although there are ethnic tensions in Khartoum, the kinds of grievances that rural Darfurians have over discrimination and a lack of development are less intense here, a city on which the government expends an estimated 70 percent of its budget. In Fur Quarter, for instance, most homes are connected to government power and water systems. Many houses have satellite dishes on the roofs.

In other neighborhoods, members of the Zaghawa community -- one of the three ethnic groups targeted by government militias in Darfur -- are some of the wealthiest residents, living behind high walls with fancy gates. Zaghawa businessmen dominate the city's biggest market.

But there are limits to how rich and influential those outside the ruling party are allowed to be. Upwardly mobile Darfurian elites often wind up co-opted by Bashir's party.

After security forces arrested and jailed former rebel leader Abu al-Gasim for six months, for example, the authorities offered him a cushy government job on his release.

These days, Gasim can be found in an overly air-conditioned office in Khartoum furnished with overstuffed leather couches, an ornate wooden desk and all the sweet tea he can drink. He heads a government compensation commission that is supposed to be doling out money to Darfurians affected by the war, but the money has not materialized.

Gasim said he is monitored constantly.

"They are liars," he said of the government. "But outside of the government, in Khartoum, everybody is equal. Ordinary people here don't see me differently."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

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