On Cheap Selling and Cheaper Buying!!

As I See

Adel El-Baz

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Why is it that whenever they sell or buy, they always go for the cheapest option? By God, they baffle me. They seem to have inherited the sponsor’s own stinginess, and companions, by comparison, become alike.

When hundreds of young revolutionary protesters were martyred on the streets on the day the sit-in was violently dispersed, the leaders of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) did not rush to seek justice for their comrades. Instead, they rushed to formalize a partnership with the military. They sprinted toward the seats of power while the blood of their comrades had not yet dried.

Those same military leaders—whom they accused of killing their comrades—were handed the blood of the martyrs at a bargain price, in exchange for fleeting chairs. They sold them cheap, though the martyrs among them, alive and dead, were ascetics. They left their bodies to rot in morgues, allowed the known criminal—now their ally—to escape accountability, exposed and unpunished. They bartered blood for chairs, traded souls for scepters. But because God does not guide the schemes of the failed, their betrayal did not last long: the chairs soon shook beneath them. Panic set in; they sprang up in fear, then conspired with the killers of their comrades to ignite the very fire they had threatened—only for it to consume them in just retribution for betraying their comrades and their homeland. Everything was sold cheap in the bazaars of their hollow consciences.

When they lit the fire of war, they did not stand firm to fight like men defending their honor—honor they had left exposed to the Janjaweed, who raped their sisters and mothers. Instead, they fled into the arms of the sponsor, who bought them, as usual, for a song: apartments, golden residencies, and a few dirhams that neither satisfy hunger nor avert it. They sold their comrades first, then their homeland, then their families, and finally sold themselves—each time for a paltry price befitting them. There is nothing surprising here. What is astonishing is that they did it openly, without shame, when death would have been preferable to riding the horse of disgrace.

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As if the theater of betrayal is incomplete without those who sell from within, and those who buy from outside—or conspire.

After blood was sold for chairs in the corridors of Khartoum and the regions, it became the turn of those seeking to buy what remains of bodies, land, and dignity at the lowest prices on offer in the regional influence market.

News broke over the weekend that the Emirate of Abu Dhabi pledged to donate $500 million for humanitarian relief in Sudan. The announcement came at a conference in Washington held three days earlier, where no other country pledged funds except the United States—with a laughable $200 million—to confront what is described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Just look at that.

Now comes the role of the external buyer—attempting to purchase cheaply what was sold for even less.

What matters here is that the UAE, just as its local clients sold us cheaply, is now trying to buy us cheaply as well. Five hundred million dollars after all this bloodshed? Five hundred million—payment for what exactly? For our country, destroyed and looted?

Yesterday, Elaph Economic quoted Muawiya Al-Barir as saying that losses in the industrial sector alone have reached $50 billion, while documented losses in agriculture stand at $30 billion. And you tell me $500 million? Five hundred million—are you serious?!

This is not the first time. The UAE has previously donated trivial sums during past crises, and now returns to present “humanitarian aid” with the same hand that helped manufacture the humanitarian catastrophe—doing so insistently.

Do these paltry figures amount to the price of our women’s honor that was violated and raped? Of course not. Can they be the price of displacing 30 million Sudanese? The price of what, then? Tell us, gentlemen of the UAE—payment for what? And “relief,” you say? Relief for whom? Who asked for or wants your poisoned aid? Who delights in eating paste kneaded with the blood of innocents slaughtered by your weapons in El Geneina, Nyala, El Fasher, and Wad Al-Noura? Who eats the flesh of his own brothers?

The story of selling—and “cheap buying”—is a faithful mirror of the scale of betrayal being staged in Sudan: a betrayal with two faces. It begins with selling blood and country at the lowest prices for the sake of chairs, and is completed by attempting to buy what remains of dignity and humanity in the bazaars of poisoned giving.

Those who sold their brothers’ blood for a pittance, and those who tried to buy what remains of their dignity with trivial sums, will one day find the market closed—because free people are neither sold nor bought, no matter how tempting the offer. These are things that are not for sale.

Those burned by the fire of betrayal have paid—and will pay—a heavy price. But they will write a new chapter whose ending will never be bought “on the cheap.”