Sudan: Censored singer tries to reform Janjaweed ‘hate singers’

Abazar Hamid told his story to Stephanie McCrummen who published it in an article and a video film for Washington Post in June 2008.

Month after month, Abazar Hamid submitted his peace and love songs to the government’s music monitoring committee which mostly censored and rejected them. Only the most innocuous of his love songs have been played on Sudanese radio.

“Songs like ‘New Sudan’, they didn’t like. Songs like ‘Peace Darfur’, they didn’t like. Next week, I’ll try ‘The Abyei song’, Abazar Hamid said, referring to a reggae song he wrote about a contested Sudanese town which was recently destroyed by government forces.

“I talk with them and talk with them, and sometimes they allow it. The love songs make it. The others, they don’t,” Abazar Hamid told Stephanie McCrummen.

Abazar Hamid has a lawyer, and they often argue with members of the government committee when they try to censor his lyrics or ban his songs. He recently cut a pragmatic deal with the censors to let him record and produce ‘New Sudan’ and ‘Peace Darfur’ in exchange for never singing a song he wrote titled ‘Enough’ (in Arabic: ‘Kifaya’).

The lyrics of ‘Enough’ go:

• And now the whispering became screaming

• And the ash burns as a fire

• in opposition to cheating.

• We will not wait for a long time.

We will not wait until night.

The Janjaweed women
37-year-old Abazar Hamid, a married father of three, lives in an apartment in Khartoum. He recently decided to give up his day job as an architect to devote himself full time to the more controversial goal of using music to transform a country so often at war with itself.

Stephanie McCrummen met Abazar Hamid in a desert trading town in Darfur where he is trying to reform the traditional Arab singers known as Hakama – more colloquially, the Janjaweed women – who are singing “you have to kill, kill, kill!”

According to Abazar Hamid as well as several human rights groups, these women singers have a big influence on the community and play a very dangerous role in the conflict. Stephanie McCrummen writes: “A bit propagandists, a bit hate radio, Hakama singers exist in just about every Arab town and village in Sudan. Their traditional role is to compose and sing songs to stir up men’s baser instincts and launch them to war.”

‘Hate songs’
During the early part of the Darfur conflict, many were paid with cash, gold and jewelry by local authorities to sing songs urging the government’s nomadic Arab militias – which came to be known as the Janjaweed – to kill, rape and pillage ethnically African civilians.

According to an Amnesty International report which quoted an local chief, one the lyrics of one song went like this:

• The blood of the blacks runs like water

• we take their goods

• and we chase them from our area

and our cattle will be in their land.

The power of [Sudanese president Omer Hassan] al-Bashir
belongs to the Arabs
and we will kill you until the end, you blacks
we have killed your God.

The chief also told Amnesty International that the Arab women racially insulted women from the village, singing:

• You are gorillas

• you are black

and you are badly dressed

This is “one of the greatest perversions of the use of music in history apart from Nazi Germany”, writes the American blogger Bill Boushka about the indications that the government of Sudan directly has been imploring the Hakama singers to sing ritual pieces to “inspire” the government troops to attack ethnic civilians in Darfur.

The Darfur conflict takes place in western Sudan but there is concern that is spreading to other areas of the country in conjunction with radical Islam.

Encouraging atrocities
In 2004, Amnesty International collected several testimonies mentioning the presence of Hakama – the ‘Janjaweed women’ – while women were raped by the Janjaweed militiamen. During an attack on the village of Disa in June 2003, it was reported by Amnesty International that Arab women accompanied the attackers and sang songs praising the government and scorning the black villagers. The women stood nearby and sang for joy, encouraging the atrocities committed by the militiamen.

“The women singers stirred up racial hatred against black civilians during attacks on villages in Darfur and celebrated the humiliation of their enemies,” said the human rights group’s report, which was based on more than 100 testimonies from women in the refugee camps in neighbouring Chad. The ‘Janjaweed women’ appear to be “the communicators during the attacks. They are reportedly not actively involved in attacks on people, but participate in acts of looting.”

The Janjaweed militiamen are reported to have abducted women for use as sex slaves, in some cases breaking their limbs to prevent them escaping, as well as carrying out rapes in their home villages, the report said.

The United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that over the past three years nearly 200,000 innocents have been killed – massacred, raped, or become victims of disease. It is estimated that 86,000 people have been killed as a direct result of armed violence in the conflict, while around 110,000 have died from starvation and diseases. Two million have been forced from their homes, including 220,000 Sudanese refugees who have fled across the border.

These figures, however, are based on theoretical calculations. They are not based on an actual count of dead bodies. It should be noted that, in comparison, there appears to be a general agreement that in 2007 approximately 1,500 people were killed in direct conflict. No one actually knows the real figure.

Similarly, it should be noted that it is being debated among researchers, journalists and experts exactly how much influence the ‘hate singers’ have had on the conduct of war. Researchers are disagreeing about the background and organisation of the Janjaweed, and it appears that some of the Janjaweed groups change side from time to time – sometimes they are with the government, at other times against it. The situation is complex, and it doesn’t make it less complex that governments in the Western world has an interest in the oil resouces in Sudan.

Not entirely convinced
The article in Washington Post describes what an accompanying 1:43 minutes video clip shows: how Abazar Hamid sat in the desert trading town in the hot shade of a tree with a dozen or so Hakama singers, trying to convince them of the less financially rewarding, and perhaps less exciting, merits of singing about peace. Wrapped in green, red, yellow and peach sarongs, their eyes rimmed black with kohl, the women did not seem entirely convinced.

“If you don’t sing for your men to kill, other men will come and kill you,” said Khadija Jacob

Quotes from Stephanie McCrummen’s article in Washington Post are re-published with permission from the author.

Sudan – the largest country in Africa

Abazar Hamid

Click on the loudspeaker icon to listen to ‘Enough’ (‘Kifaya’) by Abazar Hamid (4:00 minutes)

“This is one of the greatest perversions of the use of music in history apart from Nazi Germany”
Bill Boushka, blogger   – about the Janjaweed women singers

Update

On 1 November 2008, an updated version of this article is published in the Danish magazine Cultures.

PDF in Danish language