Sudan - first impressions

In the first six hours in Sudan I have already had four or five experiences which have already started defining the place for me

Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop

Sudan seems to have a schizophrenic attitude to tourists. In some Sudanese embassies it is almost impossible to get a visa, whereas in Addis Abbaba, once I had coughed up the US$100, I had mine the next day. Then when you enter the country you are subjected to varying degrees of interrogation at a collection of different inspection posts - immigration, customs, police, security police and some guy in an office who really insisted I sign a piece of paper the contents of which I had no idea. However I am an old hand at border crossings, so despite the hot sun bearing down like it wanted to tear holes through me, and the hot wind that sucked the moisture from me whilst filling the air with a sandy mist, I summoned all the patience I had left and slowly trudged from one place to the next. After receiving the appropriate permission to travel, which required me to donate another photo of myself to the Sudanese government, the minibus filled up, drove around town a couple of times, visited immigration and customs with a passenger list and then the security police again (they did a final bag search) , we motored off out of town.
About two minutes down the road, at the end of town was the first checkpoint - customs and immigration and security police all had a look inside, and requested my papers. I then had to get out, get my bag down from the roof and watch them go through it again - it wasn't just me they were doing this for all the passengers. I watched the guy who pulled up next to us in a ute, be approached by four different sets of officials in four different coloured uniforms.


We then drove another one minute and stopped at the army checkpoint - three small thatched huts, a concrete building in the middle, a radio antenna, and five or six very bored looking soldiers languorously draped over anything they could find in the shade. Behind the buildings was a four wheel drive ute with a machine gun mounted on the back. (Yep, just like you see on the news about Darfur !!)

After we passed through this checkpoint we drove another fifteen minutes before we reached the next one - out comes the passport, the same questions, the rudimentary look through what everyone's luggage and then we are on our way - until the next checkpoint. After another two or three of these stops couldn't help but think about how this is the African special - that is the idea that if enough people do a job enough times in a half arsed way eventually the combined efforts will lead to .... umm, well will lead to something. Perhaps it is law enforcement by tedium - eventually you give up and stop travelling.

Despite the extreme heat, even when I open the window when we are moving at a good speed the air being blown in is hotter than inside the van, I manage to fall asleep. I am woken by stopping at another checkpoint, and I wonder how many I have missed - the van driver now has my passport in a vain attempt to speed the process along. However this time I have to answer the where are you going ? questions myself, and then get to watch as the luggage all gets checked again. Three hundred metres down the road we get stopped again, and everyone's papers are checked.

This went on for the four hours it took to cover the one hundred and fifty kilometres or so - the road was in great condition, the driver drove like a madman and pushed the van to what felt like 150 km/h but it still took over four hours - looking at the map made me worry that I may never make it the other side of Sudan, I don't have that many years to live.

Can I help you ?

The bus from the border drives through a maze of back streets, then comes on to a main street and drops me at what looks like a market. I am flying blind, two hours in a new country, melting from the wilting dry heat, as I don't have a map, any idea of a place to stay or where I can catch a bus to head north to Eritrea, and I understand about three words of Arabic. An older guy, dressed in a white jalabaa - the long sleeved, cover all night gown that is so favoured by Muslims with a jauntily arranged white turban covering his head, standing in front of a shop behind the make shift bus stop, notices my look of complete dismay as I stand there watching the bus drive off without much idea of what I am going to do next. He calls out "Where are you going ?" and I am so surprised by his English I wander over to him. I explain I want to find a place to stay, and we end up having a conversation about how his cousin lives in Sydney.
As darkness begins to settle, and the wind whips up the sand and dust to make a technicolour sunset which obscures the otherwise very plane town, my new friend tells me to
"Take this taxi, pay 40 cents and I will tell him where to drop you." He asks me if I want a hotel or a lokanda (big dormitories for local men, where 15 or 20 beds are spread out in an open area, costing less than a dollar for the night) I choose the cheaper option, at which point others from the crowd that has now formed advise me that I want hotel. (It always strikes me how I must be seen by locals - I was out drinking late last night, I haven't had a shower in a few days, most of my clothes appear to be allergic to soap, I haven't shaved for a month, my hair does really look like rats' tails, and I arrive in some broken arse town in the middle of nowhere in a crappy old minibus, and locals still think I want to stay at the Sheraton.) A discussion ensues as I try to make it clear what I want, and when the taxi finally fills, the old man approaches me as we are about to take off and says, " We Sudanese, our problem is we talk too much"

Where are all the women ?

As I wander around town at twilight, I ask myself where have all the women gone - there are none in the shops, restaurants and out door spaces like Ethiopia. Every once in a while I see a few here and there, and all of those are covered up, dressed completely in black with only their eyes showing. I notice the change immediately as the country seems so much more dour, as though the life and colour has been stripped out of the place.

I keep wandering and everyone is surprised, and happy to see a stranger, calling out hello, and when I stop to speak to people I am inundated with invitations - invited to have tea, then invited to have juice, then dinner, and then invited to have a juice. And of course as I am a guest, I am not allowed to pay for anything - even though some of the people earn less than a couple of dollars a day, they insist, and go on insisting when I try to argue, that they must pay.

I can almost feel the moths starting to breed in my wallet

Don't mention the war

Having dinner outside at a table, and joined by two or three younger guys, all trying to speak to me in varying levels of English. As my plate was still hall full and I was completely full, I turned their invitation to join them around, so they poured what was left of mine in to the communal plate and we ate out of that. Joined by another guy who asked e to speak in English as he wanted to listen. He told me he wanted to leave Sudan because there was no future. When we had finished the guy who had arrived last walked away and then came back and said, Come with me, my friend here wants to talk to you, so we walked inside the restaurant and sat down. The first thing they said to me was, "you know the ICC ?" I thought I was going to be on tricky grounds, so I played dumb, "Ah no, umm, yes, umm"
"We like Ocampo, we think he is right"
Suddenly I felt the mood changing, and they were off
"There is no democracy in Sudan. The President is a criminal, we like O'Campo (the Chief Prosecutor at the ICC) The government in Sudan is not a good government, it keeps the people down. They are criminals, and we want to change them but we can't"
"But you can talk about it, like this" I asked, surprised that they were letting rip in public
"Yes, because everybody in Sudan agrees. Nobody likes him - it is just that people are afraid, and we don't know what to do to change. What should we do to change ?" I was asked earnestly
"Well, I just arrived and..." I stumbled
"Before you came to Sudan you have an idea of what the place is like, what do you think of Sudan ?"
"Well I only arrived today from Ethiopia, I have only been in the country for five hours , and all I saw was police stop, police stop, police stop, police stop" I answered
"Yes, for us it is the same. When we move around in our country we are treated like foreigners, the government tries to stop us from moving around. I tell you in Sudan there are only two classes, the rich and the poor. I want to leave Sudan because there is no future here, people are very poor and nothing will change. How can I leave Sudan ? Can you help me go to Australia?"
After all this I was a little flummoxed - particularly as the night before an Ethiopian had told me that I couldn't talk politics there, and I had only been in Sudan a matter of hours. Before I could answer, the guys thanked me and told me they were leaving. They then paid for my meal on the way out.
After thinking about it for a while, and pondering in particular how indicative of general public opinion they were, I started to think that often we in the West fret about imposing our rights on others, whereas the truth probably is that the people at the bottom of the pile want as much of that imposed as they can get. All that navel gazing and po-mo relativism worry can be thrown out the window, countries should be able to impose moral standards upon governments, and perhaps more importantly, should be able to enforce those standards - particularly when they are grossly violated.
I confess that think Al Bashir is a thug, and that whilst the ICC procedures may do very little to reign him in, they do serve as a good precedent. Now I am also starting to think that maybe the procedures are also supported by the majority of Sudanese, which can only be a good thing - for us and for them. Hopefully we can live up to the trust they place in us.