03-December-2024

Weekly Press Columns Digest

Weekly Press Columns Digest


KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - Following are summation of the week’s most press hyped issues and which drew writers’ commentaries. They are: The Calls by some politicians to reconcile the remnants of the defunct regime (the Islamists), the controversial second filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) Ethiopia has built on the Blue Nile and what some consider extravagant for every family (rich or poor) to insist upon the slaying of a sheep in sacrifice on the Holy Bairam Islamic festivity.     

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ِAbout the call for reconciliation with the Islamists, wrote Mr. Abdelrahim Abayazeed in the electronic publication Sudanile, commenting on Dr. Alnoor Hamad call for reconciling the Islamists.

The call by Dr. Alnoor Hamamd to reconcile the Islamists is not a new one. The man, after he returned to the country from abroad, even before regime downfall, had been calling for accepting the status quo and going ahead in organizing the elections the defunct regime called for. This call by Dr. Hamad is a hiding of facts, and a forgetting of the lessons of history. 
Dr. Hamad  has forgotten to call upon the Islamists to confess to their crimes and apologize to the people and criticize their experiment.

He is even calling upon us to deal with them and is urging them to bargain a reconciliation. Here he urges the Islamists to (be frank with the people, and not to hide anything).

Mr. Hamad is speaking as if he is the owner of the Sudan. He refers to the Prime Minister’s initiative of unity of ranks, trying to grade it and in these grades he wants to insert the reconciliation with the Islamists. He claimed that Prime Minister Hamdok sees that the Sudanese are not psychologically prepared now for such a reconciliation but a bargain with the Islamists is coming, quite sure.

One of Dr. Hamad’s misconceptions is that the political party of the Islamists (The National Congress) is just banned from activity during this transitional period, while the  Constitutional Document has banned this party not just as a political party as such but because of the crimes it committed against the people of Sudan (and also the crimes it committed outside the country) for ten years.

It is mean on the part of Dr. Hamad to utter such an erroneous piece of information. And what is the purpose of mentioning such a wrong piece of information?

I think Dr. Hamad is aware about the crimes committed by the National Congress Party inside and outside Sudan, a matter that puts it on equal footing with Fascism and Nazism.

The killing in Darfur and the Blue Nile and the continued massacres the Islamists had committed cannot be indemnified by a four-year punishment (the transitional period).  

Dr. Hamad seeks to flavor his article with the belief that (politics is the art of the possible), a statement he employs to defend his project for settlement with the Islamists, for his own sake and the sake of the Islamists.

And for the people he wants to say that the Revolution was born an orphan. This is a belittling of the Revolution and the sacrifices of the people and their political forces. The revolution has its leaders. The Islamists and their followers have killed some of those leaders before your eyes. And you still defend the Islamists and want them to sit with you, because you believe in them.

The Sudanese Revolution is going ahead with its achievements, despite the constraints and drawbacks and the attempts to pull it back.

The one who thinks we will forget the killing of the revolutionaries, maimed them, destroyed their eyes and bereaved their mothers, is wrong.

We will not forget the crimes in Darfur, Alobied and the IDP camps. We will not forget the breaking of the sit-in around the Army General Command which was undoubtedly committed by the Islamists. No criminal should escape punishment.

How dirty are the bargains that stifle the blood and souls lost in a peaceful revolution whose major motto was: Freedom, Peace and Justice.
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Writer, University Professor, Mahdi Amin Altoam, like many other Sudanese, was apprehensive the second filling of the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam would disrupt the flow of irrigation water to Sudan’s major farming schemes this summer cultivation season and also cause a scarcity in drinking water in some parts of  the country. He wrote in the electronic publication Alrakooba (the Shack):

Thank God the second filling of the Renaissance Dam was  completed without any visible negative impacts on Sudan. But this second filling, in its general framework, has increased our conviction about the inescapable and highly necessary conclusion of a practicable and binding agreement on the Dam operation, for security and psychological reasons of concern to our people living along the banks of the Blue Nile.

On the other hand such an  agreement is a practical, and scientific necessity of concern to the administrations of the Sudanese dams and the administrations of the existing agricultural schemes.

The absence of such an agreement is sure to cause loopholes in terms of poor information and executive uncertainties in the planning of the country’s aspired agricultural renaissance, a matter that our Eastern neighbor should not accept for us.

The binding Dam operation agreement is a necessity for the life of Sudanese, dear Eastern neighbor of ours.

It is never an undermining of your sovereignty, as it does not seek to encroach on your rights because we, the people of Sudan, are not less keen than you are about preserving your sovereignty and rights, in full recognition and glorification of an eternal relation between our two peoples.

We just know beforehand in order to take precautions and secure our dams from collapse and our lands from being swept by floods. Is that much?

The prevailing conditions dictate the sidelining of sensitivities and irrelevant considerations for this great edifice to be completed and spread its bounties without any unnecessary impediments and without any Sudanese apprehensions which you should  take into complete consideration. That is because they are real fears impossible to live with now or in the future and also because they are a necessity of life for a direct neighbor, brother whose interests should not be tied to the interests of others. .
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About the keenness of all Sudanese to sacrifice a sheep (dahiyya) on the Holy Qurban Bairam day, wrote Mr. Abdalla Alsheikh in the daily newspaper Almawakib (the Processions):

The dahiyya (sacrifice) divulges the contradictions we are living in.

The dahiyya is not religiously obligatory. The Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) had slain two sheep, one on behalf of Himself and his family and the other for the entire nation of Islam.

So there is no need for everybody (rich and poor) to make this sacrifice.

Some people who do not have the money, borrow to do so, or buy the sheep in installments.

The money wasted thus could have done a good deal to the individual and to the country.

To make things worse for the public is the case of the middlemen who raise the sheep prices as the Bairam approaches. The biggest sheep in Australia, for instance, cannot cost what we pay here for a locally bred small sheep. So how can the prices of sheep be that high in our country that has the biggest herd of livestock in Africa?

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