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By Nhial Bol KHARTOUM, Jan 8 (IPS) -- Members of the Nubian Alliance, which groups the Wadi Halfa, Dongola and Marowe communities in Sudan's Northern State, are threatening mass suicide to protest the taking of their land for the proposed Kajbar Dam.
''We are preparing to commit suicide if our land is taken from us,'' said Suad Ibrahim Ahmed, the leader of the Alliance which was formed to campaign against the building of the dam.
''Allowing our land to be taken means the extinction of our distinct language and culture forever. Our intention is that we must die before our culture and our language,'' she says. ''Where can we go if our area is taken?''
Ahmed, who is a respected woman leader within the communities fighting against the dam project, told IPS that the people are not opposed to development which protects their culture.
''We told the government that we want development. We say 'yes to development, but no to the dam'. Any development that displaces us, destroys our language and our culture is rejected, and we prefer to live without development if that is the case,'' she says.
Sudan's government however, seems determined to go ahead with the project and has sent a Chinese Company to survey the area. Colonel Mohammed Saliheen, the Engineering Affairs Minister in the Northern State, confirmed last December that the building of the dam will start soon.
The state and federal governments are determined to implement the project to boost the power supply to people in the area, Saliheen adds.
The minister, who comes from the Wadi Halfa area, told the official Sudanese News Agency (SUNA), that the government will resettle communities affected by the dam, and that the people will be compensated.
''We are going to resettle citizens who are affected by the establishment of Kajbar Dam,'' Minister Saliheen told the news agency. A committee, chaired by the first Vice-President General Al Zubair Mohammed Salih, has been set up to oversee the resettlement and compensation plan.
But Ahmed told IPS that the people had refused to accept any compensation and they did not want to be resettled in new places.
This week, the Nubian Alliance issued an urgent appeal to the media and human rights groups calling on them to put pressure on the government to stop the dam project.
''We are a group of Sudanese Nubians from the District of Wadi Halfa, the area that has suffered from an inundation of dams four consecutive times this century, and is about to become extinct by the fifth,'' the appeal says.
''Our concern emanates from a real fear that our ancient culture and language are being deliberately undermined through government policies at present which are unappreciative of the cultural diversity of the Sudan, and only tolerate the dominant Arab-Islamic culture,'' the two-page appeal continues.
''Some of us feel that the real aim of this dam is to obliterate out of existence, not just our culture and heritage, but also the very existence of the Nubian people themselves, '' says the appeal written in English and Arabic.
Since the early 1900s, the Nubian people in Northern Sudan have repeatedly and forcibly been removed from their ancient land by the building of dams. The Nubians were moved four times between 1902 and 1963.
The Kajbar Dam will be built in the middle of the only substantial population centre where most of the remaining Nubians live.
Wadi Halfa, Dongola and Marowe are the three main towns where 17,914 Nubians now live in the north. The majority of them were relocated to eastern Sudan, on the border with Eritrea and Ethiopia, in 1963.
According to some people from the Wadi Halfa area interviewed by IPS, the government has allegedly resorted to strong-arm tactics to force the people to move. The port at Wadi Halfa was closed which resulted in food shortages in the Wadi Halfa area. The people are selling their belongings, and are reported to be moving to Khartoum, the capital.
Ahmed wrote a letter on behalf of the Nubian Alliance to the Sudanese President General Omar Hassan al Bashir urging him to intervene.
''Considering the overall policies implemented in the area, including the plan to build Kajbar in the face of numerous technical, economic, environmental and social objections, make us feel that we are discriminated against in this country Mr President,'' she says in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by IPS.
''Objectively, Mr President, there are no reasonable justifications or plausible explanations for policies that destroy a fragile economy, scatter the only remaining Nubian communities away from their ancestral lands and as a result, obliterate their distinct language, rich antiquities, ancient culture and way of life forever,'' she argues in the letter. (end/ips/nb/pm98)
