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Alfred Taban, the Publisher and Chairman of the Khartoum Monitor, Sudan’s only independent English-language daily newspaper, recently received an award from the National Endowment for Democracy and met with President Bush. During his trip to the United States, he sat down with Jerry Fowler to talk about the Darfur Peace Agreement, comparing it to South Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement. They also discussed the situation in the South and the challenges Taban faces as the Publisher of the Khartoum Monitor.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Alfred Taban. He is Publisher and Chairman of the Board of the Khartoum Monitor, Sudan’s only independent English-language daily newspaper. He is visiting Washington to receive an award from the National Endowment for Democracy. Alfred, welcome to the program.
ALFRED TABAN: Thank you for having me.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me begin—the Khartoum Monitor is an independent English language daily. It is the only English language daily, but how much independent press is there in Khartoum?
ALFRED TABAN: After the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement—that is the CPA—that brought peace to Southern Sudan, quite a number of newspapers that come out—English, now we have Tout Monde that came after the signing of this peace agreement. The peace agreement, of course, is popular because it calls for inclusiveness, it calls for democracy, it calls for freedoms, and so a lot of these newspapers are taking advantage of that, and yes, quite a number of independent newspapers have come up since the peace agreement was signed in January of last year.
JERRY FOWLER: How tolerant is the government of this independent press? At its core, the government is still basically a military dictatorship.
ALFRED TABAN: The government is still a military dictatorship, but they also realize that they have to keep to this peace agreement, the CPA, so their treatment of the press, somehow, has improved. They use to lock me up—on average, four times a year—and they have closed my newspaper ten times in the last five years. This is not happening, but other harassments are continuing.
JERRY FOWLER: What kind of harassment?
ALFRED TABAN: I will give you an example. One of my reporters went one day and attended a press conference given by Ghazi Suliman. Ghazi Suliman is a member of Parliament from Northern Sudan; he is a lawyer, but for the SPLM, and he is very much anti-dictatorship, and he talked about the need to remove laws that restrict freedom. There are many laws today that still restrict freedom, and he asked for the removal of these laws. My reporter returned to the office, a security man came after him and told him, “Do not write you know what, what Ghazi said,” and this poor fellow did not. He was very scared, and this security is still making a lot of people, a lot of journalists very scared because they believe that they have not changed their activities. The security man told him, “Do not go upstairs to Taban to tell him,” because my office is upstairs and this frightened fellow did not, but then he felt a bit guilty, he felt his conscience. After a few days, he came up, he went up to me, and disclosed to me this story and I was very, very furious. That is one of the ways in which they are continuing to exert pressure on the media and the press.
JERRY FOWLER: Tell me a little bit about before this period where there has been a little bit more openness. When they are shutting down your paper, when they are arresting you, how do you go from day to day? How do you operate under that kind of a threat?
ALFRED TABAN: When the arrest me, I have no problem because my newspaper is still going and I am very happy because prison life in Sudan, I am already more or less use to it. I have been in prison for seven months; three and a half of them in solitary confinement, so when they take me for a week or so, I do not really mind, but really what I am concerned about is the closure of my newspaper because then we have no income and people go hungry, and this is a big one. The closers were the ones I have been very much concerned about, rather than my physical residence. This is something I am very much use to, but all the time we are closed down, of course, we try very much to get out. We have appealed to the Supreme Court. We have appealed to the Appeals Court, and twice the Appeals Court has overturned the rulings closing us down. One time, we even appealed to the President.
JERRY FOWLER: President Bashir?
ALFRED TABAN: President Bashir, yes, we went to him. That is after the peace agreement, our last closure which was in June and July of last year, and we told him, “What is this Mr. President? The CPA talks about this, and we have been fighting for peace and now we are in the same boat with you because there is a peace agreement. Now what is this that you are closing us down?”
JERRY FOWLER: Did you meet with him personally?
ALFRED TABAN: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: What did he say?
ALFRED TABAN: He said he did not know that we were closed down, but of course, it was then through the National Press Council; it was not us who just went along, so in case, he said to me that he did know that we were closed down, which of course, I think is not true, but anyway. We were reopened and we used all means available. There was even a time we appealed to the Supreme Court—it is called the Constituent Court—to try to overturn one of our closures. It did not help us, but very often there are appeals in the Supreme Court that have helped us. Judges in Sudan—the first ruling, normally is done by one judge, and it is very easy to pocket one judge—but Supreme Court and Appeals Court it is three judges and it is very difficult to pocket three judges.
JERRY FOWLER: Who does the pocketing? Do you do the pocketing? The government pockets, but aren’t all the judges appointed by Bashir?
ALFRED TABAN: Yes.
JERRY FOWLER: So why would the judges ever rule in your favor?
ALFRED TABAN: Because we are close minded; because the government talks about freedom, but they are not implementing that freedom. We do not believe that we have done anything wrong. If anything, we are closed because we are exposing some of the wrong things that the government has been doing like human rights violation. I talk about freedom of the press, which has been improved, but human rights violations have not. Arrests of people in Darfur have continued, and beatings of people have continued. Recently we had in the University of Juba, where students, where there was a program, and government forces went in and they beat students, and committed very grave human rights violations, so the government profile on human rights has not really improved at all, although, I agree in the press, yes, it has improved.
JERRY FOWLER: You are in the United States to receive an award from the National Endowment for Democracy which is associated with the United States Government, and you met with President Bush on this trip. How does that affect your situation when you go back to Khartoum? Does that make you more at risk? Does it help to have this kind of profile in the United States?
ALFRED TABAN: I think it is a little bit of both. I will probably be attacked by the government for coming to the United States and maybe saying things that they do not want, but then, I think, they would think twice about arresting me because I think that would make more problems for them because this meeting really has raised our profile and I am very happy with that. I think it will make them a little bit careful. They are unlikely to take very serious stance because they know it would bounce back on them.
JERRY FOWLER: You mentioned the Comprehensive Peace Agreement which was signed between the government run by General Bashir and the rebels in the South, and that resulted in the formation of a new government of National Unity that includes southerners. Has that had much affect on the operating of the government? Do the southerners now have some power?
ALFRED TABAN: No. A number of ministers from the South had been appointed in the North, and to very responsible positions. By responsible I mean ministries that they used to not have before, like Foreign Affairs, Higher Education, Humanitarian Aid, Foreign Trade, but if you talk to these ministers, you will find that they have not been given any authority at all, so they are just there as figure heads. I can give you one or two examples. We had a minister of Foreign Trade, he is a southerner, and he is responsible for Comessa. Comessa is a regional grouping which is supposed to eventually remove freight restrictions there and for the end result, they really want more trade between us and Central African countries; there about twenty or twenty-two. One day the Minister of Finance throws Sudan’s membership of Comessa. I think one businessman or two said, “This Comessa is bringing and flooding our country with cheap goods from Egypt and Kenya, and we businessmen are being put out of business,” so he just cancelled it, but that responsibility does not respond to him. It belongs to the Minister of Foreign Trade. He is not the Minister of Foreign Trade, and I believe it is because he is SPLM, he is a southerner. If it was a northerner, because there had been a Comessa for a number of years, and there was a northerner who was Minister of Foreign Affairs, and this Minister did not freeze Sudan’s membership in Comessa. That means they just do not really care. Then we have also the case of the Minister of Humanitarian Aid, who is a southerner, the Minister of Humanitarian of Humanitarian Affairs, and we had the NGO law. That law was very bad. It could have been written in Moscow or Beijing or somewhere. It was very restrictive of NGO activities, and they never consulted the Minister. It was written in Arabic and the Minister does not know Arabic. It was not really translated in English, so it went to Parliament and there it sits. Really, this government wants to control power by itself, and it has not changed. It has been doing that since 1989. It is still doing it today.
JERRY FOWLER: One of the basic premises of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement which is also a premise of the Darfur Peace Agreement which was signed in early May is the idea of power sharing, and that was one of the reasons this government of National Unity was created, but it sounds to me like what you are saying is that the agreement may be to share power, but there is no real sharing of power.
ALFRED TABAN: That is absolutely right.
JERRY FOWLER: How is that going to change? What would it take to change that?
ALFRED TABAN: I have no idea, but the agreement is good—we are talking about the CPA, not the DPA, not the Darfur Peace Agreement because the Darfur one is something else and it is not fair—but the CPA is fair to the southerners. It gives the southerners their fair share of power, and so on, but the government is not really implementing it at all. It is good on paper, they have agreed to it, but in reality, they have never wanted to implement it. What is going to happen likely is that Southern Sudanese—because at least in Southern Sudan, 75% of the power is in their hands—
JERRY FOWLER: In the region?
ALFRED TABAN: In the region, yes; not in Khartoum, so they are more or less abandoning Khartoum and said, “We are going to the South, we are going to rule ourselves,” and it is going to lead to oppression of the South, and the SPLM now, very few of them are complaining even what I am talking about because they have given up and they say, “Ok, since they want their Khartoum, they can stay with their Khartoum, we will go the South,” so it is going to lead to the separation of the South.
JERRY FOWLER: Will the North allow that or at least the elite in Khartoum, because ostensibly under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement there will be a referendum in a few years where the Southerners can vote on whether to remain part of Sudan, but will that vote even happen, or will it be a new war?
ALFRED TABAN: Whatever the case is because they cannot reason, they cannot say about “not allowing,” when they are not implementing this peace agreement, so if the South now decides to go, even without implementing the agreement, they cannot say because even if they are not implementing the agreement, they are actually talking openly about the agreement. I can give an example of what the Abyei Commission, ABC—
JERRY FOWLER: Abyei is one of the regions that is contested between the North and the South.
ALFRED TABAN: That is correct, that is correct; there is also some oil and so on. The CPA—that is the Comprehensive Peace Agreement—talks about this Commission studying the situation in Abyei and making recommendations, and that these recommendations have to be accepted at once and implemented. This is a fifteen-man Commission, five members belong to the National Congress—that is the ruling party in Khartoum—five from the SPLM, and five are foreigners, principally from Kenya and from the United States. The head of that Commission is the former ambassador of the United States in Sudan, Donald Petterson. They came up with the recommendation that Abyei belongs to the South. That should have been implemented immediately. Do you know what Bashir said? He said, “This Commission has overstepped its mandate.” This is a Commission that he agreed to form, and agreed to put in practice its recommendations, and he said that they have overstepped their mandate, just because the report of that Commission was not what they wanted. They wanted Abyei to remain as part of Northern Sudan. It is not a question of now not implementing the agreement, but rejecting the agreement, because implementation it can be slow, and there can be reasons for it. You can say that we are lacking these resources and that is why we do not implement it, but this is now, not that. It is now rejecting, purposely violating, so they cannot now say, “Ok, we will not allow,” and of course, it is possible, and if they do not allow, it will turn to war, and the Southerners will go to war; being one of them, I know. They are prepared to go to war.
JERRY FOWLER: How likely a possibility is that? Someone commented to me recently that Abyei was the Achilles heel of the whole CPA.
ALFRED TABAN: Yes, because here is a group, a government that is rejecting; slow implementation of failure to implement can be explained by anything—lack of resources or time-wise, we did not have the time—but rejecting is something else, and this is what they have done for Abyei. Abyei is a test case. It is very, very serious because they did not say, “Ok, we accept this recommendation, but we are not implementing it now;” they are saying, “We reject,” so I think is now obvious.
JERRY FOWLER: Let’s turn for a second to the situation in Darfur. One question that I had—first, you commented that the Darfur Peace Agreement is not fair; I think that most people will know that the government has signed and one rebel leader, Minni Minawi, but other rebel leaders have not. Why do you say that it is not fair?
ALFRED TABAN: You just have to compare the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the Darfur Peace Agreement, because these cases are similar. The people of Darfur and the people of the South are fighting the same case, the case of marginalization. They want to end their marginalization. They want to participate fully in the running of their country. They want resources to be divided equally. For the South, you more or less gave them what they wanted. You gave them seventy percent of the power. How much power is given to the people of Darfur? Virtually nothing. The South is given thirty-three percent of the members of Parliament—a third of the positions—positions in the Civil Service, across the board, in all of the Ministries, and then, members of the government itself. In Darfur—I have not seen the figures—I think it is five percent, yet, Darfur has a population of six million; the South has about ten. Darfur should have had about a quarter of the North—of course the South has taken its share, you cannot include them now—should have taken about a quarter.
JERRY FOWLER: But, of course, the Bashir people would not—it would have to come out of their share so they would not want to give up more.
ALFRED TABAN: They do not want to give. Then there is the issue of security arrangements. This is very, very serious. The people of Darfur, they have two hundred thousand displaced, who have run away from attacks by the Janjaweed.
JERRY FOWLER: Two million displaced?
ALFRED TABAN: You are absolutely right; two million who are in camps. Now you are talking about four thousand troops protecting two million displaced; is that possible? That is the number of troops that is going to be integrated from the rebels into the army; only four thousand. How is four thousand going to protect two million, and then eventually, maybe six million, because the whole population of Darfur is threatened?
JERRY FOWLER: Of course, what everyone is pushing for internationally is a United Nations force to help protect civilians which President Bashir has denounced, and at least so far, has said that he will not allow it to happen—either a United Nations force, much less a United Nations force that includes NATO. Does he have the support of the Sudanese population when he says that foreigners should not come into Darfur?
ALFRED TABAN: It does not. The people of Darfur, they actually want international forces. They want NATO forces in Darfur, but that also does not mean that they do not want their own people. They cannot rely entirely on United Nations or international forces because what I hear that they are talking about is twenty thousand. Twenty thousand is not going to be, but they also need more of their own forces, their own children, their own boys to give the protection because the Janjaweed and the government are very powerful. The government has airplanes, the Janjaweed have horses, and they can move very, very fast in Darfur. They need the combination of all of these. The agreement does not really give the people any road; four thousand is not any road at all, just nonsense. The people of Darfur, they support NATO forces, not only United Nations; they want the United Nations, but better still, they want NATO forces because maybe what NATO did in Eastern Europe, in Serbia and so on, they think this is the group that can bring about—the United Nations sometimes is a bit slow and many of them I know, very unhappy, but they are most unhappy about the African Union. They do not want the African Union there because these are people who are playing Bashir’s game. This peace agreement is very, very unpopular in Sudan, in Darfur, and unfortunately the United States government is following the wrong policy because it is pushing the people of Darfur to accept this sell out—they describe it as a sell out.
JERRY FOWLER: A sell out?
ALFRED TABAN: Yes, and the United Nations says, “Yes, this is a good agreement.” I heard the other day Frazer—
JERRY FOWLER: Jendayi Frazer, the Assistant Secretary of State for Africa.
ALFRED TABAN: Yes, “This is a good agreement.” Who thought that this is a good agreement? Only less than ten percent of the people of Darfur accept this agreement. This is the Zaghawa, and Minni Minnawi, who is a Zaghawa, accepted this agreement because he got the fourth position in the government, and for selfish reasons. The wealth sharing; they are giving the people of Darfur seven hundred million in two years. They are asking for forty billion. I agree that forty billion is a little bit on the higher side, but nevertheless, giving them seven hundred million, when you are earning three billion dollars a year from oil revenue alone. I agree part of it has been to the Chinese, because finally the pipe lines are constructed, but nevertheless, this is a huge amount of money you are getting; you should be taking that money to the people you have deprived for years, for decades. The United States should be putting pressure on the government to give more concessions to the people of Darfur, in all these fields—in security arrangements, in wealth sharing and in power sharing. They should give a lot more. This is what is going to attract the people of Darfur to peace and to this peace agreement, otherwise, you are really going nowhere. I am hearing, “Sanctions should be imposed.” For God sake, you have deprived these people of everything, and still you want to impose sanctions on them. They have to accept even a useless agreement like this? The United States should compare the two agreements—the DPA, the Darfur Peace Agreement, and the CPA, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement—and then they will see the difference.
JERRY FOWLER: Unfortunately, we have reached the end of the time that we have. Alfred Taban is the Publisher and Chairman of the Board of the Khartoum Monitor. Alfred, thank you so much for having been with us.
ALFRED TABAN: Thank you very much.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
