The state crackdown on civil unrest in Sudan is a beast with many ferocious heads.
The most vicious: a violent offensive that has seen peaceful protesters beaten, shot and tear-gassed by government forces, and a targeted assault on the doctors that heal them. As the regime’s brutal tactics to quell the popular uprising went on full display, a secondary clampdown on the media was set in motion. It has left me writing this piece from London and not in Khartoum, where I have been reporting since the protests began eight weeks ago.
A week after one of our Channel 4 News reports on Sudan aired in the UK, I received a panicked phone call from the National Security and Intelligence Service head of foreign news at the Ministry of Information. The report was about a man called Yassir Ali, who had been shot by a sniper while peacefully protesting in the capital on Christmas Day. He was arrested by masked security agents while the bullet was still lodged between his lung and spine and they made it clear to him and his wife, who we interviewed in the piece, that they wanted this bullet back.
The government had been systematically interrogating cameramen to find out who was filming these reports — they were careful not to approach me directly after a recent physical confrontation between me and armed forces caused a scandal. Eventually, I was told over the phone that the government was going to file a criminal case with the charge of “inciting hatred against the state” and that Yassir’s wife would be forced to stay in the country to testify against me in court. A successful conviction would have led to me receiving a sentence of life imprisonment or the death penalty.
I was flown out later that night before I could be placed on a no-fly list with my movements paralysed by court proceedings.
My evacuation is just one symptom of the government’s public campaign against “agitators”, a metaphor used to describe journalists covering the uprising who — by default — amplify the anti-regime chants of the protesters and expose the methods used by the state to silence their calls.
Since the start of this wave of protests on December 19, 70 reporters have been arrested and six foreign correspondents have had their press accreditation withdrawn. Adam Mahdi, a reporter in Nyala, South Darfur, has been sentenced to three months in prison for allegedly violating state law. Last week, reporter Hussein Saad was reportedly dragged out of a taxi and arrested by security forces in broad daylight. Two days later, they ambushed the offices of Al-Jareeda, a newspaper, and arrested journalist Ali al-Dali. It was the third week of a government-imposed publication ban. The next morning, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir met with newspaper editors and announced a pardon of all detained journalists. Mr Saad, Mr Dali and 10 other jailed reporters were released over the weekend. But today, authorities arrested journalist Durah Gambo as she covered demonstrations in Omdurman and Adam Mahdi is currently serving his prison sentence in Darfur.
State seizure of newspapers is now at an all-time high, but press censorship in Sudan is nothing new. The country ranks at the bottom of press freedom rankings — it came 174th in a list of 180 nations in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index.
I grew up in the Khartoum offices of my father’s newspaper, Al-Khartoum, watching state censors rip apart editions they deemed critical of the state or taboo in some other way. When they were feeling particularly spiteful, they would wait and seize the copies after they had already been published and the money spent.
In 2015, the newspaper was shut down by the same national security apparatus that has now threatened me. Four years before that, our printing press was forced to fold after government printing houses heavily subsidised costs to lure business away from private media enterprises.
On Tuesday, columnist Shamail al-Nour had to appear in court, prosecuted for alleged violation of the information act by writing an article about the protests on her Facebook page. The crackdown extended to the digital realm from the very start of the demonstrations; internet access to popular social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter has been restricted by the government since December 20. But the use of Virtual Private Networks has meant that Sudanese social media is active and awash with graphic videos of peaceful protesters bloodied from gunshot wounds and hospital emergency rooms ambushed and tear-gassed.
Optics are everything for the Sudanese government at this moment of crisis. The regime is trying to maintain regional ties and continue bilateral talks with the US to have the country removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. They are trying to stifle a growing popular movement by any means necessary
