Death of Khalil Ibrahim

Khalil Ibrahim in North Darfur, May 2009

The government of Sudan has reported the death of Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, the largest and most powerful of Darfur’s rebel groups.

I met him two and a half years ago in the desert of North Darfur. I spent five days dodging Antonov bombers which appeared every morning and evening, when the air was at its most still, to hunt Khalil. He was with some of his senior commanders, who had gathered from all across Sudan – including the South and the East, far from Darfur – to prepare strategy for the year ahead.

It was a fascinating insight into Jem and Khalil. This was a sophisticated movement. As we hid out beneath acacia trees I wandered among the technicals – pickups armed with heavy machine guns – chatting to well-educated fighters, many with degrees or who had left decent jobs to take up arms. Among them I met Khalil Mohamed Ahmed, who was running a mobile media centre, uploading video and press releases to the the Jem website.

And I sat for several hours with Dr Khalil himself, who set out his motivation for walking away from Omar al-Bashir’s government and setting up his own rebel army. As we talked he tried to rebut allegations his force used child soldiers and described how his forces were preparing for another push. Much of his rhetoric was familiar to anyone who has read the Black Book, setting out the inequalities that riddle a Sudan run by a small, northern elite. And his analysis was largely Islamist, arguing not for a more secular Sudan – as say the rebels of the Sudan Liberation army might – but for greater equality in line with the Koran. It was clear he remained influenced (and in touch with) that wily old architect of Sudan’s Islamist revolution Hassan al-Turabi.

In some ways, Dr Khalil wanted to overthrow Khartoum not because it was an Islamist government but because it wasn’t Islamist enough.

And the trip was a reminder that in Sudan’s desert war the good guys were far from squeaky clean.

You can read more about my time with Jem, along with my trip into the Jebel Mara on a donkey with rebels from the SLA, in my book Saving Darfur, which is now available for Kindle.

I’ll spare you most of the propaganda that came from Sudan’s information ministry announcing Dr Khalil’s death, and leave you with its account of how he died…

The rebel movement forces, led by Dr. Khalil Ibrahim, had begun moving starting from Wadi Hawar area and across Al-Malha, Um Kadada, Al-Tuwaisha localities, the outskirts of Um Bader locality and Wad Banda locality. The forces of the Justice and Equality Movement attacked innocent citizens at their villages, looted shops and vehicles, destroyed houses and kidnapped a number local youth from the areas that it has looted along with groups working in gold exploration.

The Armed Forces have been pursuing the rebels of the Justice and Equality Movement, which was well armed and moving in more than 140 cars, since December 14th until they were able to defeat them December 25th. JEM leader, Dr. Khalil Ibrahim was killed, alongside 30 others, including leading commanders in the movement.

Yesterday, rebels confirmed his death.

You Say Madrassah

So the results of my not very scientific poll are in. And as of this moment, madrassah has it with 32% of the vote, taking it just ahead of madrasa, with madrassa coming in a close third. Madrasah trailed in a very poor fourth.

And the discussion suggests that pronunciation is the key, with the rather harsh “AH” sound at the end being the closest to the Arabic.

So despite looking – to this eye at least – a little archaic, The Daily Telegraph Style Book has it right!

I Say Madrassah, You Say Religious School

Wali Mohammed outside the madrassah, madrassa... well you know

Not often I get an email with the subject line “style advice”. On this occasion it could not be dealt with by a pithy “cowboy boots go with anything” sort of response. In fact it was from Telegraph HQ, from the poor chap who has to make sure that assorted correspondents around the world agree to use the same spelling for troublesome words – often proper names – such as Gadaffi, Koran and so on. The problem is those languages that simply refuse to use the Latin alphabet. Transliteration gives a range of options. All could be considered correct. But which is the best one to use?

It can even vary from place to place. In Libya, for example, it may be that Gadaffi is pronounced with more of a K sound, so it could be spelled with a Q or a K.

The issue for news organisations is consistency. There may be no correct answer, but for reasons of neatness a single spelling is preferred. Different spellings will be a distraction to the reader.

And so it was that my story this week on the madrassah in Karachi seems to have sparked a bit of a debate, hence the email asking whether I have much of a preference. The options are…

• Madrassah – this is the current preferred choice, according to the 2010 style guide edited by Simon Heffer. But it looks a little archaic to my eye
• Madrasah – one discussion suggests this may be the best spelling according to the Pakistani Urdu pronunciation
• Madrassa – this was my favourite. But that was based on my lousy English pronunciation of an Arabic word. So probably not a great guide
• Madrasa -preferred by The Guardian and it seems to be the most widely used online. That shouldn’t really matter, but these days with SEO and so on you don’t want readers missing your site because they are using a different spelling variant to search the web

Anyway, enough of my wittering. Just wondered if there were any proper linguists who could tell me the best spelling? And everyone else can lodge their vote on the poll below…

The True Horror of Madrassah Zakarya

Wali Mohammed, 7, and his father at the Zakarya Madrassa which has been closed since last Monday night

Last week police in Karachi raided a madrassah on the city’s northern outskirts. The local police commander was at dinner but received a phone call from his boss that a TV station was running reports of boys in chains. When his men arrived they could hear screams coming from beneath an open-air meeting room.

Beneath it they found what one commentator called a “torture chamber”, with drug addicts chained to each other in a brutal form of rehab. One little boy was pictured screaming during the rescue.

On Friday I visited the madrassah to find out what really happened. And, as always in Pakistan, the story was not quite how it first appeared.

The madrassah is right at the northern edge of Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital. May of the city’s services don’t reach Sohrab Goth, a desperately poor area of dirt roads and half-finished houses, home to day labourers originally from Afghanistan and the south-western province of Balochistan.

Seven-year-old Wali Mohammed, the boy in the picture, was there with his father and dozens of the other madrassah pupils. He hadn’t been chained. Most of the boys were enrolled there to pick up a rudimentary – and free – education. Although the madrassah was closed and its head was on the run, they still gathered there every day waiting for classes to resume.

They were the lucky ones.

Some were at the madrassah because they were troublemakers. Two brothers, 10 and 13, were chained to each other after being brought there by their father for running away and stealing a wheelbarrow from a neighbour. They described being beaten and locked in at night. Then there were the drug addicts, chained in an underground warren rooms.

The most horrifying thing was that rather than being shocked by conditions there, the parents all knew what was going on.

Nor have the revelations shocked people with experience of Pakistan’s patchy drug programmes or mental health facilities. They described wards in hospitals where patients are chained to beds or even given heroin

“The problem is that what facilities exist are very expensive,” said a mother whose son received treatment at a private clinic for drug addiction.

“There is nothing for poor people so I’m not surprised that they have been persuaded to send their children to a place where they were chained or beaten to give up drugs.”

Even the police, who themselves know how to wield a stick, were stunned by the welts and bruising they found on some of the boys.

“The police also use these methods but we have to face the courts and the media. These guys showed no mercy,” said one officer.

So the real horror is not what went on at one madrassah. It is that, in a country where public services are desperately underfunded, this is undoubtedly not the only place where children are sent on such brutal “cures” by parents trying to do their best for them.

Faces of Lahore

Was a little shocked travelling through Lahore the other day to see an image of Osama bin Laden adorning the back of a rickshaw, until it was pointed out to me that it was an advert for a book. Seconds later, this trundled past…

Twitter and the President’s Health

Look closely and you can make out what appears to be a medicine bottle by President Zardari's right hand, in this picture from a meeting with the Senate chairman earlier this week

There are numerous lessons to draw from President Zardari’s sudden dash to Dubai for medical treatment:

1) Pakistan loves a conspiracy – no need to elabourate

2) Pakistan’s government lacks a co-ordinated media operation – at first officials said Zardari had gone to Dubai to visit his kids and for routine medical tests, then it was at his doctor’s recommendation for unscheduled checks, then at his children’s insistence. Unfortunately a government minister let the cat out of the bag by suggesting it was far more serious. Then press releases described the president’s heir meeting all and sundry, making it sound as if the succession was under way. A PR disaster

3) blogs are all well and good for analysis, but less good for breaking news – a report that a president’s illness may act as an excuse for him to stand aside – and is expected by the govt in Washington – is rather undermined by putting a big fat question mark at the end

4) twitter is screwing news values – now, where once a journalist might quietly keep an eye on a story or ignore it altogether, the sheer volume of twitter makes rumours and speculation impossible to resist. If I ignore something, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone else will pick it up. The result is that wire agencies now rush out reports explosions in Pakistan, which later turn out to be gas leaks, because they cannot ignore the online chatter. In the old days they would check the cause first. Now we are all competing in an online race

So where is all this going? A story on the president’s health, when the president is unpopular in a country with a history of coups, is a legitimate area of inquiry. But increasingly stories are blowing up because a small twitterati elite get their knickers in a twist. I remember advice I was once given by a seasoned hack at The Herald: “The stories you leave out are as important as the stories you put in.”

That’s almost impossible in our twitter-happy days.

Deja Vu and Diplomatic Showbiz in Bonn

Even before Islamabad decided it would not attend the international conference on Afghanistan, the local media had already made up their mind on its value, describing it as The Bonn Moot, presumably with as much power to effect change as a sixth form debating society.

With 80-odd countries taking part and more than 1000 delegates, it may well be the biggest international meeting held in Germany since the Berlin Conference that sounded the starting gun in the Scramble for Africa, but it’s difficult not to conclude that this is largely a talking shop.

Just like the original Bonn conference in 2001. Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former British ambassador to Kabul, spells out its failure in his book Cables from Kabul

“I tell how I came to see that the Taliban had never been defeated in 2001-2; that the Bonn settlement that had followed had been a victors’ peace. from which the vanquished had been excluded; and that the constitution resulting from that settlement could last only as long as the West was prepared to stay in Afghanistan to prop up the present disposition.”

With the Taliban not present – and far from defeated – it seems that nothing has changed, except this time the West is getting out and we’ll be left with a retreaters’ charter rather than a victors’ peace. And this time even Pakistan won’t be there, reinforcing another of the crucial failures spelled out by Cowper-Coles, this time in The Daily Telegraph…

“And, ignoring all the lessons of the Great Game, we failed to engage Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours systematically in the struggle to return Afghanistan to its proper place as the crossroads of south-west Asia.”

In the absence of any real idea of what to do about Afghanistan, we’re just left with another round of “diplomatic showbiz”.

Saving Darfur is now available for kindle

It’s a couple of years since I left Nairobi. I spent five years living there and travelling around east Africa. And this past week I’ve watched (for the umpteenth time) Pole to Pole, Michael Palin’s trip from north to south, taking him through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania filmed in 1991 which made me a little homesick for the place.

At that time no-one had heard of Darfur. But everyone knew about the civil war in the south. Palin’s trip almost comes off the rails when Khartoum says his route is too dangerous, forcing a detour east into Ethiopia.

That was all 20 years ago. But one of the many things that made me smile (in a sort of weary way) was Palin reading from his guide book’s description on Sudan. I forget exactly how it went, but it was something along the lines of: “Sudan is a land ravaged by drought, famine and civil war.”

That description could pretty much have been written at any time in the 40 years before Palin’s visit or the 20 years since.

His trip through Ethiopia is similarly fascinating. There, the hated Mengistu had just been toppled yet Palin is baffled by the way that most Ethiopians are far from jubilant, perhaps sensing that the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front may not quite be the answer to everyone’s prayers.

What’s my point? I don’t know really. But it was fascinating to watch a travelogue of a place that I came to know later, which was still going through violent upheaval two decades later. Back then such wars tended to go on unnoticed and untweeted.

Darfur, I suspect, may be the first of a new kind of war, one that followed our disastrous failure in Rwanda. Now we feel a responsibility to try to prevent crimes against humanity in the rest of the world – whether it be campus marches, warplanes over Benghazi or checking the sourcing of mobile phone components.

But as I came to find out there is a big difference between feeling a moral duty to help, and actually making a difference on the ground. That debate – about how best to help – is at the heart of my book, Saving Darfur. And all of this rambling is essentially to say that it is now available for kindle. You can read a bit more about it here and here.