For Darfurians, 'Luck' in Khartoum

Sudan's Capital Offers Relative Freedom

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- An ambitious young man from the conflict-plagued region of Darfur, Zacaria Adam leads a carefully calibrated life in Sudan's sprawling capital.

He goes to work most mornings at the Ministry of Culture and Information, biting his tongue if talk turns to Darfur, where government militias burned his village to the ground. In the afternoons, he attends university lectures on political systems, telling himself that education, rather than rebellion, will best serve his people.

And in the evenings, he heads home to Fur Quarter, a bustling neighborhood named for its residents from Darfur's ethnic Fur community.

"You imagine my brother in the camp in Darfur," Adam, 30, said, sitting in his 10-by-10-foot, dirt-floored room furnished with twin beds and a ceiling fan. "He has no electricity, no water. He is suffering from the heat. Here, we are lucky."

It is a relative sort of luck that Darfurians experience in Khartoum, where they have migrated by the hundreds of thousands in recent decades and now constitute perhaps a third of the population. Tens of thousands more have arrived since 2003, when a brutal government counterinsurgency campaign was started in Darfur. By some estimates, it has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced more than 2.7 million.

But the life and times of Darfurians in Khartoum -- where they live in slums and middle-class enclaves and work as engineers, street-side tea sellers and even government bureaucrats -- offer a more complex portrait.

Although Darfurians in Darfur have been subjected to extreme government brutality, those in Khartoum say the government generally treats them with a kind of liberating indifference.

"In Darfur, people are controlled by the government's system," said Abdirahman Osman, a tailor and Fur leader with no love for the government. "Here, we're like any other Sudanese."

'We Have Another Life'

Khartoum has a Big Brother-ish air about it, with images of a smiling President Omar Hassan al-Bashir plastered on banners, billboards and windshield sunscreens. The images have proliferated around town since the International Criminal Court indicted him on war-crimes charges in March.

With the conflict still festering, Darfurians here live with the constant threat of the national security forces. After an unprecedented rebel assault on the capital last year, for instance, security agents jailed several hundred Darfurians on suspicion of aiding the attack. And, in general, anyone who speaks out against Bashir is monitored, perhaps arrested and tortured, critics say.

But despite such repressive actions, many Darfurians -- even families of some prominent Darfur rebel leaders -- lead hassle-free lives in Khartoum.

Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar and director of the Social Science Research Council in Boston, said one reason Bashir's party is not threatened by Darfurians in its midst is that the rebels have failed to organize urbanites into a political party or mobilize large-scale demonstrations of the sort that have helped topple previous Sudanese governments.