رد من جوبا على موضوع مساوئ الإنفصال

Dear Yassin,

I suppose you must be an educated person who understands the principle of "cause and effect". I am sorry that I am writing to you in English and not Arabic, hoping that you may get the meaning of what I am saying. In fact, I do not know how to use the key board for writing Arabic, not even for a mobile phone text message.
I have read your article about what you consider to be the bad parts of separation of Southern Sudan after the referendum. I am a Southern Sudanese and I am replying to you because you want Southerners to know about those points, and perhaps, to give you their opinion.
This is my response to your points, one by one, about the badness of the independence of Southern Sudan:
1. Your assertion that separation will restrict the movement of Southerners and Northerners is true. But what will a Southerner gain from roaming in a big space (2 million kilometre squared) if he/she is looked at with suspicion in northern Sudan, and can not even dream of ruling his "large country" some day?
2. That Southerners are ruling themselves now is true, but it is also true that they are not getting their fare share of their own resources. Can you imagine how bitter it is?
3. Tha majority of Southerners who have jobs in the north or Khartoum for that matter are unskilled labourers. They will have plenty of unskilled labour work in the South if they are forced by the north to return. But you should not forget that the services being provided by these labourers matter to northerners more than the wages these people receive. It is absolutely your choice, to evict them and loose the services your people are not commited to do, or allow them to stay and benefit more. The majority of these southerners will come back to the south voluntarily. Most of them were forced to relocate to the north by the Sudan Armed Forces which looted, raped and killed many as it pleased during the war. In the north they were being chased all around by local authorities and moved to far locations where only western relief agencies took care of their needs.
4. Very few southerners have their own houses in Khartoum. I assure you, the number may not reach 100 persons only. During the war, Southerners lost more than houses. If northerners want to rob them of their property, it will not exceed the price they paid for their self emancipation for the last 55 years.
5. Southerners born in the north will jot regret moving to the south because they have not seen all their life anything reflecting them and their culture in the main official media (TV, Radio, etc.). Just watch the normal Sudan TV programmes and you will not see Southern Sudan there, neither in the employee structure nor in the programme. The main official media is propagating Arabism and Islam and excluding others. Do you still wonder why southerners are thinking differently nowadays?
6. The problems of Sudan started before the discovery of oil. When it was discovered in the south, northerners (the infamous Numeiry regime) tried to change the border to let the oil areas be attached to the north! The successive governments did their best to push some northen border tribes to the south to claim part of the land. The Ingaz regime made sure that no oil refinery facility is put in the south just to make it depend on the north. Recently, the Governor of the Central Bank, Mr Sabir, sarcastically asked "where will southerners take their oil to sell when we have the infrastructure (pipeline, refinery, port, etc.) with us here in the north? Will they drink the oil?" Southerners must agree the terms of renting the northen oil infrastructure and manage their own oil even if the oil available will last for one year.
7. There is nothing wrong for the south to import its agricultural needs from the north with hard currency unless the north does not want to continue growing econmically as it has done at the expense of other parts of Sudan. There are other markets for the south to turn to if the north chooses not to copperate, wich I doubt very much. At the moment, Sudan is importing a lot of things with hard currency. In fact, the south is not getting its rightful share of its oil-earned hard currency from the central bank. You might have heard what happened in June when southern oil money was transferred in local currency, denying the south of importing essential medical equipment and other necessities.
8. There have been no concrete transfers to the south of non-oil money or even forign grants and loans. If it happened we would have seen national projects for hydropower generation (and there is a lot of potential) or agricultural development, etc. We in the south do not deserve big projects resembling Merowe dam, which brought development to a terrible desert. If you had the opportunity to read in Al Ray Alaam newspaper of today (10/10/2010) you will find an interesting interview with the Chinese Ambassador in Khartoum, where he bluntly said that oil production from the southern oil fields has helped northern Sudan to achieve great development within a short time. Remember that oil production from the southern wells started in 1999 not 2005.
9. We have not yet seen how our neighbours in Uganda and Kenya will exploit us as you suggest. But we have learned more about northern exploitation and exclusion to the extent that it will not happen again, I assure you.
10. That southern tribes will fight over few jobs in the south is a wishful thinking. Our fight will take a democratic shape as we showed the world during the regional governmrnt in 1972-81.
11. Southerners will not go to war for the sake of it. But should they be subjected to any forced unity as happened in the last 55 years, they will not accept it. If it happens again, let me assure you, they will not hesitate to say no to any adventurer in Khartoum, as they have always done.
12. Presently are no qualified lecturers in all the Sudanese universities, let alone the south. What is there is an army of relatives recruited by Al Ingaz regime to destroy the educational establishment, and they succeded in doing that. Southerners will not regret losing these folks, I am pleased to tell you. The market is pelntiful with people wishing to work here in the south.
13. Your concluding suggestion that "by separation all will loose and by unity all will win" is not qualified. You must be equal stakeholders for that to happen. Northerners have become more intolerant of other views, cultures and religions and have grown more Isamic, more Arabised and less Sudanese!! They look across the Red Sea for identity, and I do not blame them because their forefathers who announced the independence within parliament, instilled in them such a strange sense of inferiority complex.
Dear Yassin, Southerners are being forced to choose their own country. Northerners have not done much to show that the country is one as others do in Tanzania, Nigeria, USA, etc. In my opinion, you have not build a strong argument for unity. May be it is time that you should carefully study the merits of separation for both north and south Sudan. I hope I have tried to explain the cause of the Sudanese problems and the end effect wich we will all welcome come January 2011.

Sorry for the long message, but that is what it takes to have a dialogue of this nature.

Yours sincerely,

Dhoma
Juba, Southern Sudan.
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