2014: Darfur rebels for killing Chinese oil workers

From news reports:

The management of the federal Kober Prison in Khartoum North on Sunday [September 14, 2014] carried out the death penalty against two men accused of having killed Chinese workers in West Kordofan several years ago.

The members of the Darfur rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) were sentenced to death on charges of murdering the five Chinese who were working at the Abu Dafra oil field in West Kordofan in 2008. 17 others were acquitted.

On 18 October 2008, a group of 35 JEM rebels kidnapped nine Chinese oil workers and a Sudanese driver at the Abu Dafra oil field. The bodies of five workers were found a few days later.

JEM strongly condemned the execution of the “freedom fighters” in Kober prison, stressing that “no JEM combatant had anything to do with the assassination of the Chinese in Abu Dafra.”

Jibril Adam Bilal, the spokesman for the movement, told Radio Dabanga that the trial, in which the two were convicted, was politically motivated. “It was directed by the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS), and has nothing to do with the judiciary in the country.”

He urged human rights organizations to investigate and document “this crime committed against innocent people.”

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1971: Four for Sudan’s Siesta Coup

On this date in 1971, four leftist officers who had briefly overthrown the government of Sudan were shot — just one day after their coup collapsed.

This was but a brief and early interruption in what proved to be the 16-year (1969-1985) reign of Col. Gaafar Nimeiry, who himself had taken power at gunpoint two years earlier.

Although Nimeiry initially had the support of Sudan’s then-robust Communist Party, the colonel soon clamped down on the staunchest and most pro-Moscow Communists, eventually inviting the attempted coup.

The “Siesta Coup” was mounted on the scorching afternoon of July 19 while city traffic was greatly thinned by the absence of everyone who could arrange to duck into a shady refuge instead, and it worked at first: Communist officers bloodlessly seized control of the government and of Nimeiry’s own person. But very few Sudanese people — and almost no governments in the region — had enthusiasm for the usurpers; Muammar Qaddafi even had Libyan fighter jets intercept and force down a Khartoum-bound British Airways flight carrying two coup-friendly politicians from London, so that he could arrest them on the tarmac in Benghazi.*

On July 22 anti-Communist soldiers deposed the coup government and restored Nimeiry. Within hours, four principal actors in the Siesta Coup were being dispatched to their eternal rest; the others were Maj. Hashem al?Atta, commander in chief of the armed forces for the coup government; Col. Abdel Moneim Ahmed; Lt. Col. Osman Hussein; and Capt. Muaweya Abdel Hal.


The doomed Hashem al Atta passes his waning hours enduring a harangue from Khalid Hassan Abbas.

* Those two men, Farouk Osman Hamadallah and Babakr al-Nur Osman, were returned to Khartoum as soon as Nimeiry was back in the saddle, and were also executed within days.

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2010: Six Sudanese southerners from Soba Aradi

On this date in 2010, six men from war-torn southern Sudan were hanged in Khartoum’s Kober prison for a deadly 2005 riot.

The protracted north-south Sudanese civil war had only just abated with a tenuous peace treaty earlier in 2005, when Sudanese security surrounded the refugee camp-cum-suburb of Soba Aradi outside Khartoum in May 2005 in a sudden bid to forcibly resettle its predominantly southern population.

The resulting riots burned down a police station and claimed around 13 policemen’s lives, along with many civilians.

Nasty.

“We were forced to protest when a police officer shot a seven year old boy three times in the head”, said Mr. Mile Michael, a South Sudanese living in the area since 1986.

Following the death of the young boy, the slum dwellers burnt down the police office in the area killing some of the officers with machetes and knives in a revenge attack. “We all participated in the burning of the police office because they deceived us that they would support us in resisting the soldiers but they were the first to kill our children, so we were willing to sacrifice ourselves for our children.”

While dozens were rounded up, Amnesty International charged that little save forced confessions and unfair trials distinguished the specific few marked out for hanging.

Sudan’s north-south sectional conflict is the backdrop to this month’s election, which might set the south on a path to political independence from the north.

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1985: Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, progressive Islamic theologian

On this date in 1985 progressive Islamic theologian Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was publicly hanged at a prison in Khartoum North, Sudan.

Seventy-five years old at his death, Taha spent his youth in the nationalist movement against British control of Sudan where he emerged as the standard-bearer of the liberal/secular Republican Party.

After Sudan won independence in 1956, both Taha and his party maintained — in the face of official hostility that waxed and waned with the changing regimes — nonviolent support for political openness, national unity between Muslims and non-Muslims, and a theology pointing to reform within Islam. Specifically, Taha embraced a women’s movement and opposed the imposition of sharia, at least in the absence of a radical modernization of the Islamic religious law.

The introduction of sharia in 1983 brought matters to a head, and not only with Taha: civil war broke out — the conflict between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south only recently and imperfectly abated.

Taha and four other Republicans were tried for their intransigence in a two-hour trial under a seemingly muddled mixture of secular and religious law.

Among the hundreds of attendees of Taha’s hanging this day were his four “co-conspirators.” They were themselves under sentence of death to be carried out January 20th, unless they should recant. All four recanted. Hundreds of other Republicans were held around the country on lesser charges until they did likewise.

The next year, with a new government in place, the Sudanese Supreme Court declared the proceedings against the Republicans to have been in error.

Little of Taha’s work has been translated, but his Second Message of Islam is available in English and presents a conception of the faith so unfamiliar in the west that one reviewer mitigates his praise with the regret that “it is nonsensical to talk of reforming Islam, a religion which is doctrinally irreformable.”

Taha’s thought also has a scholarly evaluation in Quest for Divinity: A Critical Examination of the Thought of Mahmud Muhammad Taha. More information by and about Taha and the Republicans is here.

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