by Zahra Hankir
We waited anxiously before being escorted to a security office. I was perhaps optimistic: I expected at worst we’d be delayed for a few hours, and that the officers were simply going to ask us about our participation in the workshop on corruption that we’d just been attending in Uganda—a country deemed an enemy of Sudan. But after an officer took away my money and phone and led us out of the building to the street, where a Toyota with four armed soldiers in fatigues was waiting for us, it hit me that we were most certainly being arrested.
We got into the vehicle and sat among the heavily armed soldiers. No one told us where we were headed, but as the car reached Khartoum University and made its way toward the bridge leading to Bahri city, I realized we were en route to the political security facility, the most violent division of the security forces. What did we, as journalists, have to do with political security? Upon our arrival at the large, depressing building, we were taken to filthy corridors, where we were made to wait until sunrise. The soldiers guarding us prevented us from speaking to one another. No one volunteered any information, and none of us dared to ask for any. I was anxious that my family would be concerned about where I was. I know how overly worried my mother can be about everything: the idea that she could be staying up late waiting for my arrival bothered me immensely.
When dawn broke, several officers arrived, and I was taken to an office where I was interrogated about the workshop I’d attended. One officer was adamant that the workshop was a front for some armed opposition activity and accused me of being a member of the communist party. I told them I was just a journalist and had nothing to do with the party, but of course they didn’t believe a word I said.
After they stopped interrogating me about the workshop and my suspected political activity, they moved on to my reporting, asking me what my problem with the regime was, accusing me and the colleagues who had also attended the workshop of wanting anarchy, and suggesting that we “liked” what had happened to the countries involved in the Arab Spring. They questioned me persistently about my interview with Hilal. This went on for hours. The officer who had arrested us at the airport would periodically enter the room and violently beat the chair to scare me into confessing things that were not true. At the end, I told the officers I would sign whatever they wanted me to sign, but they could be sure that the contents of the report would be false.
When the interrogation finally ended, we were sent back to those filthy, miserable corridors. The long journey, the waiting, and the lack of food and sleep all started to take a toll on me. Hours passed, and with no signs of an imminent release, and no answers to any of our questions, I started to feel my heartbeat quicken. My body began to shake uncontrollably as my blood pressure dropped. The officer took me to an office, and I lay down on a dreadful bed, where I remained for hours, feeling steadily worse. Finally, the officer ordered a car to take me to a hospital owned and operated by the security forces, where a young doctor gave me a little blue pill and hooked me to an intravenous drip. The pill worked like magic; I gave in and slept like a log in that room with the officer guarding me.
We left the hospital in the afternoon and I was taken back to that dismal security building. Finally, we were released, but the officers kept our identification papers. We had to return to the building three separate times after our release before we were able to retrieve them. On those return trips, every time someone at the security building heard my name, they’d do a double-take, whispering to each other, “Is that Shamael Elnoor?” It seemed they perceived me as ill-mannered and violent.
Even though the security forces had ultimately released me, they weren’t convinced that I wasn’t a member of the communist party. Maybe they wanted to fabricate a story to strip me of my press status: they clearly felt threatened by me, an independent journalist who had interviewed the leader of a deadly militia. They simply couldn’t believe a reporter could be independent, and those were the lengths that they would go to in order to scare me into silence, even though they had no proof of wrongdoing.
* * *
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All the same, I returned to Darfur less than two years later to investigate the conflict between Arab tribes over the gold-laden mountain of Jabal Amir. After the secession of South Sudan and subsequent loss of oil revenue, gold had become a key commodity in Sudan. Unregulated small-scale mines produced gold revenue for the state, but armed militias had begun to take a share of some of those revenues. Hilal effectively controlled parts of Jabal Amir; he had allegedly made millions of dollars from the gold (a charge he has denied). The state seemingly had no control in the area. Corporations worked directly with various Arab tribes; the metals ministry was completely absent.
My mission was to try to prove or disprove an allegation recently made by the Sudanese interior minister that three thousand foreign fighters were patrolling a section of the mountain, trying to get a cut for themselves. Fighting among rival tribes over the gold had resulted in hundreds of deaths, while foreign mercenaries were allegedly aiming for their own share of the commodity. Because artisanal gold mining had emerged as a crucial source of revenue for some of the militias, the interior minister’s allegation caused a huge stir politically, and journalists were scrambling to get the story. I was risking my safety and even my life by traveling to this unregulated no-man’s-land, controlled only by tribal men with guns.
I arrived at Geneina Airport by plane and was taken to a village close to the mountain. My fixer got to work right away, arranging for bodyguards and an armed vehicle to take us to the mountain that had sparked so much controversy. As we inched closer to our destination, surrounded by armed men, a number of scenarios started to play out in my head, including the possibility of a violent kidnapping.
As soon as we arrived at the mountain, I noticed that it reeked of alcohol. The smell was unbearably pungent. Drug dealing and arms dealing were also rife in this lawless area; they took place openly. The hard labor and high temperatures were too difficult to handle without drugs and alcohol, it seemed. I walked along the mountain scanning for the alleged foreign armed forces, flanked by militiamen. The place was pure anarchy.
Contrary to the interior minister’s allegations, I discovered that the foreigners—mostly from Chad—roaming the mountain were traders and metal miners, not fighters. They were still trying to get a cut for themselves, however. I spoke to these men, as well as men from the Rizeigat tribe, which had seized portions of the mountain. The assignment confirmed to me that Arab fighters had built a state within a state, and that, as suspected, the government had no control over the mountain. We headed back to the village peacefully in the afternoon. The road was open and safe.
My fixer and I got a ride from the village to the airport the next morning with a Janjaweed field commander who struck up a vulgar conversation in a mix of Sudanese and Libyan Arabic. He talked incessantly about marriage, and how he had wed several women at once. This sort of bragging wasn’t uncommon during my reporting trips, particularly those in Darfur. Men I interviewed would sometimes boast about their sexual abilities. They even had the audacity to repeatedly ask me about my sex life and were surprised to hear that I wasn’t married.
Despite these disturbing conversations, I was not at all afraid during the trip to Jabal Amir. I was merely worried that state security would stop me from doing my job, considering their disdain and suspicion toward me and other independent journalists, and that my reporting mission would be aborted before I would be able to complete it.
On our way to the airport in Geneina, we saw an Abbala on his mule carrying a weapon. (The Abbala tribe is an Arab ethnic group that herds camels on long winter and summer journeys.) I was seated in between the driver and my escort; the Abbala looked at me strangely from behind his traditionally designed sunglasses. He had a quick conversation with the driver, but I couldn’t hear what was said. The driver then told me that the man had offered to buy me from them. When I asked if he would sell
me to the man, he said, “Why not, if he pays a good price?” adding that he cared only for money.
Even though the tone of the conversation teetered between serious and humorous, I felt nervous. Incidents of kidnapping and hostage taking are normal occurrences in Darfur. I composed myself and said a transaction of that sort would embarrass the tribe’s chief. The man drove on.
* * *
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In February 2017, Sudan’s most prominent extremist and the uncle of the president, Al-Tayyib Mustafa, wrote a rebuttal to an article I had published ten days earlier criticizing political Islam in the country. In my piece, “Obsession with Virtue,” I lambasted Islamist parties’ preoccupation with form and righteousness at the expense of focusing on public health and building an educated society. “Islamic regimes are concerned about matters of virtue, women’s dress, and appearance more than health and education issues,” I wrote.
Mustafa’s response wasn’t merely a defense. It was a smear campaign. He referred to me as a “worm,” and called on people to prevent me and “the likes of me” from corrupting the virtues of the country. “This vain woman thinks that her animosity toward the ruling regime allows her to cross red lines and be brazen toward God, his messenger, and his religion,” he wrote, conflating my criticism of the regime with criticism of Islam.
Days later, the abuse started. The newspapers were full of articles that advocated skinning, lashing, and branding me an infidel. The harassment culminated when an imam known to support Daesh in Sudan announced that his Friday sermon would be called “Shamael’s journalism and silliness.” As the jihadi usually consults his social media followers on sermon topics, Facebook and Twitter lit up with fury.
This was clearly an organized campaign against me. Shifting these toxic opinions from paper to pulpit was like playing with fire. On Friday, I livestreamed the sermon from home. The feeling was strange. The young man got on his podium and delivered his sermon, mentioning my name at the end of every sentence and paragraph as if he wanted people to be wary and to remember it. He accused me of heresy, blasphemy, and apostasy, which is punishable by death in Sudan. By the end of the sermon, I was literally branded an infidel.
I was shaken. My safety had been thrown into jeopardy, and my phone wouldn’t stop ringing; friends urged me to head to the nearest embassy and ask for asylum. Various organizations that had been following the situation also called me to offer assistance. At the time, I felt like there was nothing to say. It was too late; I had already been defamed.
I soon learned that the jihadis formed a WhatsApp group specifically to coordinate the campaign that had been waged against me. For about a month, the newspaper articles kept coming. Al-Tayyar, the newspaper I was working for, responded by forming a task force to manage the crisis. We called the police and asked for protection because the entire staff was unquestionably in danger. The police sent out a special patrol unit. I had to limit my movements and lost a great deal of personal freedom. I couldn’t go out in public alone. I missed going to my favorite restaurant. Some people even advised me to carry a gun.
The campaign’s objective was obviously to drag me into some sort of a journalistic war of words. I decided to take the legal route, filing lawsuits instead of responding directly by writing a rebuttal piece, but they were useless. Every time I filed a claim, my detractors filed one against me, accusing me of insulting the faith. (Although Mustafa’s relationship with the government has soured in recent years, he has enjoyed a form of invisible protection from the state, both because he is related to the president and because he is something of an icon to jihadis.)
I tried to keep the matter from my family, but after the sermon I had to tell them what was going on. They wouldn’t stop checking up on me when I wasn’t at home. Between their overbearing phone calls and interview requests from the media, my phone literally would not stop ringing. It wasn’t just that my personal security was threatened: my personal life was disrupted, too.
A human rights division at the United Nations contacted the Sudanese government and asked what measures were being taken to protect the journalist who had been threatened by extremists. When that specific piece of news came to light, the president’s uncle resumed his smear campaign even more viciously.
I was so weighed down by an entire month of intense anxiety that I traveled to the United Arab Emirates for a two-week break to pull myself together and find my inner strength again. By the time I returned to Khartoum, the tension had subsided, but I still felt unsettled.
That said, today, I continue along my journalistic path in Sudan, and my beliefs and commitments remain unshaken. I didn’t fully understand the value of my choices until after I faced all this danger and harassment—from the state, from tribesmen, and from Islamists. I have been a journalist for a decade now, and let me tell you what I have learned: this is what journalism should be, or else it shouldn’t be, at all. Though these experiences have had high prices, they haven’t weakened or deterred me. I have no other option but to move forward, like the many brave journalists who face persecution.
This is our destiny, and we remain ever devoted to it.
TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY MARIAM ANTAR
Yemeni Women with Fighting Spirits
Amira Al-Sharif
I discovered photography at age eight, and have never looked back. At the time, my father was building a home for our family in Saudi Arabia, where we lived before the Gulf War forced us to flee to Yemen. I was so fascinated by the process that I decided to document the stages of construction with his Polaroid camera. There are very few photographs of me as a child, and my parents say it’s because I always had control of the family’s camera—if anyone took it away from me, I would throw a fit, as if someone had deprived me of my favorite toy.
Although I was born in Saudi Arabia, I’ve spent most of my life in Yemen, a tiny, poor country at the very edge of the Arabian Peninsula. My father is an imam—a Muslim preacher—so I was raised in a conservative household along with my two brothers and five sisters. (Yemenis tend to have rather large families.) I wear the hijab when I’m in some public places, but when I’m out on the actual streets of Yemen, I wear a burqa.
Today, at thirty-five, I don’t have a husband, but I do have my camera. Mine is an unusual situation for a woman in this country, as Yemenis usually get married in their teens. Women often depend on men for the most basic of tasks, particularly moving around from place to place. Had I gotten married as a younger woman, I would have been expected to rely on my husband and to focus on raising a family, not on pursuing a career. I defied those societal expectations. Being unwed is the price I have paid for my professional life.
* * *
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When I decided to become a photographer at the age of twenty-two, I had to grapple with how my family might react, and how I would logistically be able to pursue a career in the industry when it is so difficult for women to move around freely in Yemen.
I had secretly started working for a local English-language newspaper, the Yemen Observer, while at university. The university’s administration quickly detained me for covering a student strike: women were not meant to attend such demonstrations, let alone publicize them. The university penalized me by registering me as absent for a term. With the help of a friend, I pushed back, and the decision was overturned.
At first, I kept my ambitions a secret, in part to protect my parents. I didn’t want to burden them with my desire to break free from the many rules imposed upon Yemeni women. But soon after the incident with my university, my father learned from a relative that I had been taking photographs in Hayeil—a local souk. I would start my days in the old town: it was my favorite place to take photographs and one of the few where I could move around without limitations.
My father was upset and accused me of taking advantage of the trust he’d granted me. I’d been sent to university to learn, and to then come home, he sai
d, not to take photos in the streets. His final decision was to forbid me from returning to university.
This came as a shock to me, but I knew it was a spur-of-the-moment reaction. Baba had always been supportive of my ambitions; when I was a child, he had encouraged me to work hard so I could reach the top of my class. He had also bought me my first camera as a gift. He was clearly just worried about how society would react to my roaming around town with a camera.
I apologized, knowing that I had to calm him down in order to win over his trust again. After a few days of silence, I worked up the courage to negotiate with him, pointing out that my work at the Yemen Observer was strengthening my linguistic skills because I had to translate reports written by local journalists from Arabic into English. He relented and eventually allowed me to return to school.
A year later, I graduated from university. I was the first woman in the Al-Sharif family to do so. Even though he accepted my career choice, my father could not bring himself to attend my graduation. My accomplishment had set a precedent for the entire family, however. A year later, my sister graduated from Arhab University, and our father attended the ceremony. Another relative of mine has since allowed both his daughters to attend Sana’a University. Over time, my father has grown proud of me, although he still worries for my safety; now, he even suggests subjects for me to photograph.
* * *
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Photography is perceived as a “man’s job” in Yemen. I am probably one of a handful of professional women photographers in a nation of 28 million people.