Terror intensifies
As the SA government continues to justify its unlawful decision not to arrest Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir when he visited this country, a Sudanese filmmaker says President Jacob Zuma missed an opportunity to end the racist war that al-Bashir is waging on black Africans.
“The arrest of al-Bashir would have saved thousands of Sudanese lives and freed millions from displacement,” Hajooj Kuka told the Financial Mail.
Kuka will release his award-winning documentary, Beats of the Antonov, at the Durban International Film Festival this weekend. The film gives a human face to the horror in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile regions of Sudan, where al-Bashir’s regime continues to drop cluster bombs on black civilians in his quest for an Arab, Islamic state.
In the documentary one such civilian, Awadia Tulma, explains how people like her live in daily fear of the Ukraine-made Antonov planes and their bombs. “So much lost over the last two years living with daily threats from the plane . . . I have lost a child and everything else,” explains Tulma, who is considered “black” and not “Arab” by the Sudanese government. Al-Bashir has vowed to wipe out what he refers to as “black sacks”.
Beats of the Antonov, which has just won a People’s Choice Documentary Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, was made over two years by Kuka, who stayed in war zones in the Blue Nile and Nuba areas and filmed in refugee camps.
“Omar al-Bashir, who is by all counts a black African, chooses to identify mainly as Arabic-Islamic.
“This is not an issue until he, and all previous Sudanese governments, impose this, at gunpoint, as a national identity on the rest of the 56 major ethnic groups that make up Sudan. This one-dimensional Sudanese identity creates marginalised second- and third-class citizens and an endless state of war in Sudan,” says Kuka.
Co-producer Steven Markovitz told the Financial Mail: “The world has always known about the conflict in Sudan but few understand that it is a racist war driven by an anti-black notion of Arabisation.”
Zuma’s office did not respond to requests to comment on the documentary.
The parallels between al-Bashir’s regime and the apartheid regime are stark. According to al-Bashir’s regime, black people are slaves. Those who renounce their language and culture for an Islamic, Arab culture are deemed to be patriots and acceptable. Black people are expected to “raise” themselves up to a ceiling they can’t get beyond. Those who do not are labelled as racist, unpatriotic, rebels or spies for the West. Speaking Arabic is essential to pass school.
Yusuf Elhaimar, a member of South Sudan’s Sudanese People’s Movement, explains: “This is a battle over identity. The groups in the north (al-Bashir’s army) think they are fighting an African group that threatens to take over and then impose an African identity on everyone.”
Al-Bashir is accused of engineering the genocide of 300 000 black Africans in Darfur, western Sudan. In March 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC) found that there were reasonable grounds to believe he should answer to five counts of crimes against humanity and two counts for war crimes. The court issued a warrant for his arrest.
The charges do not take into account the lives being lost in the Nuba and Blue Nile regions. SA and African Union (AU) leaders have expressed concern about the atrocities in Sudan and yet al-Bashir remains able to travel relatively freely in Africa, including SA, which is a member of the ICC and bound by its orders. When al-Bashir visited SA for the AU summit last month, government defied its legal obligations to the ICC and refused to arrest the Sudanese leader, saying that he was in the country on invitation from the AU and not government. SA also raised concerns about the ICC being biased against African leaders and re-iterated that it supported the AU decision not to arrest a sitting head of state.
“Is the symbolic battle against the ICC more important than these African lives?” asks Kuka.
SA insists that it is making these decisions in the interests of securing peace in Sudan. But the bombing of citizens in that country has accelerated.
Nuba Reports, a monitoring organisation that has been recording the bombings in the Nuba and Blue Nile regions of Sudan over the past four years, tracks how 1 764 bombs were dropped in three months from December 2014 to February this year — more than ever recorded in that amount of time.
Kuka’s film shows how black people in these regions renounce their language and try to appear more Arabic, yet groups of young people in those communities take it in turns to stay up at night to watch for the planes. They dance and play music as they wait, saying that this wards off despair.