Great news report from Khartoum, Sudan by Alex de Waal

Good for Sudan
From ssrc.org Making Sense of Sudan
By Alex de Waal
Monday, 12 April 2010

The last two days I have been in Khartoum, on the phone and email to people in all corners of Sudan. Places like Bor, Renk, Damazin, Aweil, Geneina, ed Da’ien, Hamush Koreb, Kadugli.

Names seared into the memory. Places where I took photographs of burned villages and disfigured survivors, or wrote accounts of misery and destruction. Some places that I never visited, but which were described to me by escapees who detailed their imprisonment, violation, hunger and despair. As Deborah Scroggins wrote of the displaced camps along the railway line to the south in 1988, these were “places so sad that the mind grows queasy trying to understand them.” For the last 24 years, since I spent Sudan’s last multi-party election day in the village of Nankose, south of Zalingei, whenever I received a message from one of these places, it was usually to report a story of execution, starvation, or forced displacement. My questions were, who is dead and who is alive, who is in prison and who is still free?

Today the questions are, did the ballots arrive in time? Were all the names on the electoral roll? What was the voter turnout?
Quietly, with dignity, with apprehension and sometimes with confusion and frustration, millions of Sudanese are voting. Good for them.

South Sudan: 3 police killed in LRA attack on Kor-al Madina village, Western Bahr el Ghazal

From Sudan Radio Service Friday 23 October 2009:
Three Die in LRA Attack on Raja

(Raja) - Three policemen were killed and 21 civilians were abducted following attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Kor-al Madina on Tuesday in Western Bahr el Ghazal state.

The commissioner of Raja county, Louis Ramadan Fodul, spoke to Sudan Radio Service from Raja on Friday.

[Louis Ramadan Fodul]: “The LRA attacked Kor al-Madina village. They clashed with the police at the outskirts of the town for one hour, before the police ran out of ammunition. Three police officers were killed when they were trying to withdraw. The LRA reached the town, shooting at civilians, and destroyed the market. About twenty-one people were abducted. Our force, which is in Borro, could not intervene at night because it was raining and up to now they are still running after them, the last information we heard yesterday was that our forces clashed with them but the civilians are still with them and they are heading for the Central African Republic.”

Louis Ramadan Fodul, the commissioner of Raja county, was speaking to Sudan Radio Service from Raja in Western Bahr el Ghazal.

Click on Raja label here below to view related report.