And There Are Hostages..!!
By Al-Tahir Satti
You may recall — back in November 2019 — while the Sovereign Council was negotiating with the armed struggle movements in Juba, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok visited camps for displaced people in Darfur, wearing a crisp white short-sleeved classic shirt. The visit should have been about its purpose, but the media made the “shirt” the story instead. They attacked him and reduced the entire event to what he wore.
I defended him at the time, advising his critics not to let Hamdok’s shirt distract them from the real issue — the suffering of Darfur’s people and the importance of his visit to them. I was genuinely pleased by Hamdok’s gesture, as he was the first official to visit the displaced, and by the warmth with which he was received. The residents did not chant against him as they had against former governor Kibir and other officials from the Bashir era.
They welcomed him, he spoke to them, and he listened. So what has changed today? The camps are the same, nothing in them has changed — what changed is Hamdok himself. He would not dare now, nor in the future, to visit a camp inside or outside Sudan, as the Chairman of the Sovereign Council and Commander-in-Chief of the Army did today when he visited the camp for displaced people in Al-Afad, Northern State.
General al-Burhan visited them, checking on their conditions and sharing in their sorrow. There is nothing preventing such a visit except fear and shame. Hamdok’s embrace of the sheikhdom that sponsors the terrorist Dagalo militia — the very force responsible for displacement and refuge — is what keeps him from approaching Sudanese citizens at home or abroad. There is no other reason.
Nor is Hamdok alone in this. Every “resistance activist” fears and hesitates to visit the refugees abroad, let alone think of visiting the displaced inside Sudan. They speak endlessly about civilians, yet never approach their camps or gatherings; they talk about war victims but never offer condolences to Darfur’s tribal leaders mourning the militia’s victims.
This is not a lament for the so-called activists of the current phase — their absence makes no difference, for their disconnection from people’s sorrows and joys renders them irrelevant. Some of them, in fact, are so inconsequential that even their own families don’t wait for them at lunch. Their presence or absence is the same. What truly deserves regret is the case of the former prime minister.
Hamdok today is trapped in the salons of billionaires, as Cameron Hudson once wrote in a tweet. The tragedy is that Hamdok was well-qualified to play a constructive role for his country and his people — if only he were not one of the hostages of the Al-Nahyan family and the captives of the Dagalo clan. Sadly, he has himself become someone in need of a visitor to check on his own condition — one that evokes nothing but sorrow and pity.
