Ali's Story, Part I: "to be disappeared"

This is the first part of my profile on Ali, a cab driver here in New York. He escaped a jail in Darfur, Sudan and made his way to safety by foot and later, through an alias. According to Ali, his story is not unique among many Darfourians, but it is his, and he wants the world to know what happened.

I.

El-Geneina is the capital of West Darfur, Sudan and is thirty kilometers from the border of Chad, a five-hour journey, by foot. On June 30th, 2001, Ali ran that distance under the cover of darkness. He was thirty-three years old and he was leaving behind his elderly parents, his two brothers and his pregnant wife. If Ali had stayed in the jail from which he just escaped, he might have spent the rest of his life missing from his family and imprisoned without charge. If his captors had apprehended Ali before he reached the border, he would have been killed. He tells me that he resolved his fate to two choices that day, “freedom or let myself be shot.”

Ali sits across from me in my apartment in Brooklyn, nearly six years since his escape. He just finished a twelve-hour graveyard shift driving a taxi. He says that he is happy to finally tell his story, an act that few Sudanese have done after disappearing into government custody. Ali begins by prefacing that, “This is my story but there are hundreds of thousands like it in Darfur.” [Per Ali’s request he is referred to by his first name only and the names of his family members and some of the locations in the U.S have been changed]


Before the acts of genocide in 2003, Ali’s family experienced the ruthlessness of the Janjaweed firsthand. In May 1995, as part of larger campaign orchestrated by the central government against tribes affiliated with the opposition groups, Ali’s father and uncle, commercial leaders in the community, became victims of an Arab offensive that targeted their tribe, the Massaleet. Soldiers from the Janjaweed, then called the Arab Militia, came to Ali’s hometown of Tabarek and tortured and beat his uncle and father. His uncle was killed and his father was left permanently crippled. The militia left Tabarek in flames, forcing the family to flee to nearby El-Geneina. Against his father’s pleading, Ali’s older brother Aziz, an attorney, challenged the government to hold the militia accountable. Shortly after Aziz petitioned authorities, he was warned by the secret police not to pursue the case. Aziz refused and he has been missing for twelve years. Ali was finishing up his law degree in Khartoum during these events. Five years later the secret police visited Ali’s home again, and this time they were looking for him.

Ali was born January 1st, 1968 in the small village of Tabarak, in West Darfur. His father was a merchant and sold produce to support his wife and three sons. Ali went on to the University of Khartoum and received degree in law. Upon graduating in October 1995, he set out to use his degree at the Department of Justice in Khartoum, but because Ali refused to enlist in the army to fight in the war in the south, he found it difficult to secure a job. Ali like many of his generation and background joined the Sudanese Democratic Federal Alliance Party, an opposition group to President al-Bashir’s National Congress Party. Ali’s party affiliation and his ethnicity as a dark skinned Massaleet, made finding employment in Arab dominated Khartoum additionally challenging. Ali eventually returned to his home in Darfur and volunteered at a local school. He married his sweetheart Marriba in 1999 and she and Ali moved into his father’s compound.

One evening in September 2000, Ali’s father heard a knock on their door. He opened it and was greeted by a party of five masked men with guns. The men asked for Ali. His father knowing what this request meant, offered himself.

It is at this point Ali cuts short his retelling to me. He becomes very still and begins to cry. He is caught off guard by verbalizing what his father had tried to do that day. There are other pauses like this as he tells his story. It is clear that Ali’s warm disposition and optimism belie the grief and trauma that still haunt him. We sit quietly for a few minutes and then he continues.

The masked men announced that Ali was under arrest for distributing propaganda against the government, an illegal offense. The men overtook Ali in the house, bound his wrists, blindfolded him and threw him into a truck. It would be over nine months before Ali’s father would learn that his son was still alive.

“I am about to be killed or tortured and left crippled like my father”, Ali remembers thinking as he was trucked off.

He was taken to a clandestine facility in El-Geneina confined to a small cell. Ali’s kidnappers remained masked, and he never truly discovered their identities, but the pointed questioning he faced, indicated that these men were from the central government. The officers demanded the names of the leaders of the Sudanese Democratic Federal Alliance Party, and the source of its funding. Despite having joined the SFDA in college, Ali was not an active participant in their agenda and knew none of the information the interrogators asked, nor had he spread anti-government propaganda, the original charge laid against him. Incredulous, the police initiated a regimen of physical and psychological torture. They stripped Ali of his clothes, hanged him upside down by his ankles and beat him. This type of torture went on and off for two weeks straight. Food and water were also withheld for days on end. The officers augmented the physical torture with psychological measures like listing the names of members of his family and threatening their lives. Ali imagined the worst ever since his brother disappeared five years before. He relates what he experienced during his interrogation to other government programs in Darfur:

“During interrogation if they don’t like your answers they torture you, they don’t care. They kill people with anything. In order to get information they just kill people, hundreds. You see [in the Sudan] instead of the government protecting people, they just kill [to get information], that’s the difference between there and a democracy.”

Faced with no results and the realization that they had captured a person of no strategic value, the officers hid their mistake by integrating Ali into another prison with common criminals. Ali describes being forced into hard labor building bricks. Ali knew that his captors were never going to provide him access to a lawyer or allow him to communicate with his family. Months went by and he worked in the yards cutting stone and shoveling gravel. Ali remained in this jail for another 8 months without ever being officially charged or allowed contact with the outside world. Ali realized the new nightmare upon him, even after surviving torture he might die anonymously in prison.