The Nightmare of the Exile: The Story of the Refugee from Darfur Escape, Suffering and Prison

By Adam Ahmed

I am a simple person from a simple family who was part of a simple community. I grew up in the village of Dissa in the Darfur region of western Sudan. While growing up, I didn't know what racism was and didn't differentiate between people based on their color or religion. I had no access to television or electricity, had never tasted chocolate, and my family put our money in a hole instead of keeping it in a bank.

In 2003, I was forced to leave my country with other Darfuris to escape persecution. While in Egypt in 2005, I read the word "refugee" in a book and realized that was me. I have experienced hate and racism because I am a refugee and foreign. I have been called "ponga ponga," "chocolate," "ashikabla," and "koshi." All these terms were meant to humiliate me either for my status as a refugee or for the color of my skin. I have been put in prison for being a refugee. On December 31, 2005, in Egypt, twenty-seven people were killed in front of my eyes simply because they were refugees.

This book tells my story, both the happy parts as a child and the challenging parts as a refugee. I want the world to see all of me, not just my skin or my legal status. Because Darfuri refugees aren't just a nameless mass of people. We have families, stories, lives, just like you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503587472

Adam Ahmed

Adam Ahmed, or Adam Darfur, as some friends call him, was born in the village of Dissa, 170 kilometers from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. Like many Darfuris, he does not know exactly when he was born. He, like many of his countrymen, was forced to leave his home in 2004, when the Janjweed killed more than five hundred thousand people and forced more than two and half million to live in IDP (internally displaced person) camps and refugees outside their home country. Adam wrote his book to tell the world about what happened in Darfur and the continuing crisis there. He is currently studying to be a social worker at Walden University and plans to work with displaced refugee women and children once he receives his degree. He hopes to visit Rwanda one day to learn from them and understand how they overcome their own conflict.

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Copyright © 2015 by Adam Ahmed.

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Rev. date: 07/21/2015

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgment

Chapter I Introduction

Chapter II Background History, Geography, and Culture

Geography of Darfur

Governance and Government in Darfur

Farming

Role of Men: Herding Animals

Roles of Men in the Village

Roles of Women in the Village

Darah

Culture—Marriage

Weddings

Personal Story (Wedding)

Chapter III My childhood

Where I Grew Up

My Early Life

Traveling

Preparing for Travel

Arriving at Tamad—My New Village

School and Working as a Schoolboy

Boarding School Life

City Life

Traveling Hardships

Student and Seller

Chapter IV Onset of the Conflict

How the Conflict Started in Darfur

Attack and Displacement

Livelihood in Camps

The Way of Life in Darfur

Personal Story

Why I Left Darfur

Killing of My Brother

Story of Nurreldin

Nurreldin’s Testimony Interviewed by Adam August 2014 Janjaweed Attack

Returning to His Home Village

Separated From His Family

Kalma Camp

Traveling Outside of Darfur

Story of Yasir

Yasir’s Testimony Interviewed by Adam August 2014

Yasir’s Life During and After the Conflict of Darfur

His Days in Prison (Three Times of Arrest)

Yasir’s Days in Sinai (Tortured by Bedouins)

Chapter V Darfur Today

Central Darfur

South Darfur

West Darfur

North Darfur

East Darfur

Human Rights Watch 2015 Report About Darfur

Children’s Stories in Darfur

Jacob’s Story

Why the UN Failed in Darfur

Chapter VI Egypt

Life as a Foreigner

Life in Egypt

Stories in Egypt—My Friend Arva

Mustafa Mahmoud Sit-In

Travel to Israel

How We Crossed the Border

Life in Eilat

Chapter VII Deportation/Voluntary Return

Holot

Subpoenas to Holot

Darfuris in Israel—SDG’s Story

Holot—Anwar

Anwar’s Testimony Interviewed by Adam August 2014

Chapter VIII The Nightmare of Exile

Days in Prison

Court Decision

Emotional Reflections of an Innocent Prisoner

Prisoner’s Dreams

Chapter IX My Current Work

Darfuris’ Life Outside Darfur

Hatred Outside of Darfur

Activities in the Community

Education

Workshops

Obtaining Legal Refugee Status

People We Have Helped

Community Social Events

Social Services for the Community

Final Notes

PREFACE

I am writing my story to give people the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the Darfuri culture and understand our situation in Sudan, Israel, and the rest of the world. While I have been met with extreme hate, I don’t want to return that hate into the world. My goal of this book is to convince others of my belief that it is better to look at people’s thoughts and ideas and not at the color of their skin or their religion.

Darfuris have lived a very simple life in the Darfur region of Sudan. Our region was the safest region for almost one thousand years, but due to the conflict, which began in 2003, Darfuris have become a people faced with extreme hate. This hate is often due to ignorance, and therefore, my motivation for writing this book is to help people better understand the Darfuri culture to inform others about the type of people we are, where we come from, and our traditions. I believe that knowledge combats prejudice, and I am here to share that knowledge with the world about who I am and who my people are. I want to show people that Darfuris are talented, active, and self-sufficient people.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank everyone who helped me with the writing and production of this book. I appreciate the effort they have made to dedicate their time to help me finish my dream. It means a lot not only for me but also for all Darfuris. The Darfur conflict continues, and the world remains silent. I hope, after reading this book, people will know more about what is going on in Darfur today and about the plight of Darfuri refugees who live outside of their region.

I would like to offer a special thank you to Jenny Levy. Jenny is a St. Louis native who holds a BA in governance and conflict resolution and an MA in political science from the University of Illinois. Shortly after graduating in 2013, Jenny moved to Israel and became involved in the writing of my memoir. She translated and edited much of the book. Through this experience, she has grown to become an activist for the Darfuri community in Israel and hopes to take part in informing the international community about the horrid genocide that is happening in Darfur and the hardships of Darfuris around the world. Currently, Jennifer works for a multiservice nonprofit organization that serves the impoverished communities of South Tel Aviv and Jaffa, including the refugee population.

I would also to thank Dijana Mujkanovic and Kate Backhouse for their contribution in translating and editing.

CHAPTER I

Introduction

I am a very simple person, from a very simple family and a simple community. I grew up in Darfur, and I came into exile from my country for the first time in 2004. This was a result of the government, which systematically pushed the Janjaweed against Darfuris. The Janjaweed are a militia composed of Sudanese Arab tribes in Darfur and other neighboring countries. While the Arab tribes and the African Darfuris lived peacefully for years, the government slowly began to convince the Arab tribes that the entire land of Darfur belonged to them, and it was their job to reclaim this land through brutal force. Before the conflict began, I didn’t think about discrimination, and I didn’t think about how people could possibly use discrimination to hurt others. I never differentiated people based on their religion, color, or origin.

I grew up without access to television, there was no electricity, and I never tasted chocolate. I rode donkeys and camels for transportation, I walked behind the farmer to collect the harvest, and my family would put our money in a hole on the floor instead of keeping it in a bank. But the conflict changed me. It made me a refugee; and it forced me to leave my country, my home, and what I knew.

Having lived a simple life in Sudan, we, as Darfuris, know how to take care of ourselves. We know how to organize our lives and how to share with others, but after the conflict began, our lives changed dramatically. The lifestyle we had growing up in Darfur was vastly different from the lifestyle of the places in which we were displaced, and people began to hate us because we were different.

I used the word refugee for the first time in Egypt when I read a small book, a guide about refugees, and found myself identifying with what I was reading. While in Egypt, I worked hard to make Darfuri refugees’ lives better, helping them integrate into Egyptian culture and teaching them English.

On December 31, 2005, I was in Mustafa Mahmoud square, a small square in front of the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a popular place for protests and sit-ins for Sudanese refugees. This is when my dislike for the word refugee came about and my belief that the word itself was obsolete started. On this day, in 2005, Egyptian police surrounded Mustafa Mahmoud square and killed twenty-seven protesters. When the UNHCR stood idly by, refusing to solve the issues surrounding refugees in Egypt, with growing violence and hate toward us, I realized the word refugee was a dead word; people use it, but it has no meaning.

Many Darfuris who came to Israel came because there was no diplomatic relationship with Sudan. They wanted to feel completely safe from the Sudanese government. Written on the Sudanese passport was Valid in every country except Israel. This, however, became a danger to many Sudanese who came to Israel because when they return to Sudan, they are often accused of working as a spy for Israel. At the same time, Israel accuses Sudanese refugees of being criminals, migrant workers, and infiltrators and threatens to put them in prison or sends them by force to other African countries like Rwanda and Uganda or to stay in Holot. Holot is called an open detention center, but in actuality, it is a prison. The complex is six kilometers from any city, and its occupants have to sign in once a day and sleep in the camp every night. The terrible conditions there are meant to put immense pressure on its residents to leave the country. So in the end, people have three bad choices: to go back to Darfur where they will likely be killed by the Janjaweed, to return and be put in Sudanese prison or killed because they will be accused of being spies, or to stay in Israel and live with the underlying threat of imprisonment or being sent to Holot that is affecting us emotionally. When people are put in a prison or sent to Holot, they begin to think of their families back home who are living in camps and prisons. These thoughts cause many to go crazy.

Although I have found work in Israel and I am not in danger like I was in Darfur, exile from my country continues to haunt me. I hate to use the word refugee because I feel that people look at refugees as enemies here in Israel. In the streets of Eilat, I had stones thrown at me; and in Tel Aviv, people throw eggs at me and my friends, and people shout names at us in the streets. All of this hatred makes me constantly think about my family, my friends, my country, and my culture. While I am supposed to be living in a place of refuge outside of Darfur, I am suffering and living in fear more than I am living in safety. I am constantly thinking and concerned about what law the government is going to come up with next. The only way I can describe this feeling is as if I went to visit someone in their home and they don’t like me. This is why, as a community, we hope to go back home to Darfur as soon as there is peace and it is safe to return to our families and friends.

When I grew up, I didn’t understand what racism was; I didn’t differentiate between people by their color or religion. But this changed when I left Sudan and arrived in Egypt; I understood what it meant to be hated. In Egypt, they would call us names like bonga bonga, referring to monkeys, or they would call us chocolate or shikabala, who was a famous black Egyptian football player. In Israel, they call us kushim, which is a derogatory term for black people. I continuously try to remind myself that even though there is racism toward me and people hate me here, I don’t want to feel the same hate back at them because in the end, that won’t accomplish anything. Even though racism on a personal level hurts and is difficult to deal with, the worst kind of racism is on a systematic and government level.

I experienced government systematic racism when I was in Darfur. The Janjaweed would travel in front of our house, moving with their animals in line with the seasons. We would trade them corn for milk. The relationship between us was peaceful for years when I was growing up until the government began to tell the Janjaweed that the ethnic Arabs should take the land of the ethnic Africans. This is when everything changed. The Janjaweed began to burn villages and rape women in order to change the African ethnicity to Arab. Darfur today is now occupied by the Janjaweed because all of the people who were living in the villages are now displaced in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps or refugees in the neighbor countries. The Janjaweed controls all over Darfur and just outside the IDP camps. I remind myself, when people call me racist names, that while racism exists everywhere in the world, the worst and most tragic kind of racism is the systematic and government-led racism that leads to mass killing.

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Today, as a result of the Sudanese government, Darfuris hold the name of displaced people and refugees, and we have become homeless beggars. The kind of suffering that we face has resulted in the death of many people, such as my brother in Libya, my friends in the Sinai, and my people in Sudan, due to the continuation of the conflict in Darfur. When I see the mistreatment of people, I hope that future children won’t be born into a world like this and won’t have to witness all of this suffering.

Currently, I am working on my master’s in human service administration in the Social Work Department at Walden University. All of my assignments and discussion posts require me to write about how to help people. The entire class discusses how to ensure that the people of our world are getting their basic rights and how we can help them to achieve that. The last assignment I read was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which referred to the inalienable rights of all members of the human family. It truly surprised me that this document, which discusses the international community’s responsibility for every individual’s inalienable rights, could exist when the reality is so different. I can only hope and work to educate people about the reality pushing those countries that signed this document to use and enforce it.

My main work in Israel is community work with Eritrean and Sudanese children. I’ve learned from working with children that while they are small, their minds are big. There is a difference between children when I was growing up and children now. Sometimes I ask if they need me or I need them. Even though they are small, there is not a big difference between their minds and their thinking and those of adults. When I was growing up, adults would hit children if they misbehaved. But for the children of today, it is better to talk with them. I even feel that I learn more from them than I do from other adults.

It is important for the community to understand them so they don’t grow distant from our children, creating a huge gap and lack of sharing of ideas and information. That is why it is so important to share knowledge with our children; education is crucial to improve our children’s futures, but education does not just mean to teach them English or Math but also to teach them about their culture and other cultures. We teach them about their culture in such a way so that they respect other cultures as well. We teach them not to be racists or think their culture is better than anyone else’s.

While I am a firm believer that people need people, I haven’t seen this happen a lot. Maybe this is because my people are still being killed every day in Darfur, and they are being put in prison there. Students, teachers, carpenters, merchants, and more are all being put in prison and are being tortured. I became even more disheartened when I began to see my people on the outside, who were able to escape Darfur, continue to suffer from racism and discrimination. In Libya, my brother was killed in a hate crime; in Egypt, twenty-seven of my friends were killed in Mustafa Mahmoud square on December 31, 2005; and in Israel, they don’t accept the case of Darfuri refugees and the government force as to leave the country, but we have no place to go and the suffering continues.

People don’t understand our culture or our background. They look at Darfuris and judge them based on their skin color or their beliefs. We never expected when we were growing up that we would become displaced people and live in exile from our country. We didn’t think we would face racism, hatred, and unacceptance. Our region is a closed place where people do not emigrate outside very often. Many people are left feeling helpless, confused, and not knowing how to move forward. I work to educate my peers and teach them that just because someone needs help or became