Khartoum, which dwells in us with fear... when memories flee from minds

Zuhair Osman Hamad: The war in Khartoum is no longer just the sound of gunfire from afar, planes flying over houses, buildings stripped of their doors and windows, or streets whose features have changed so much that one needs an old memory to recognize their city. There is another war taking place within Sudan, a war not visible to the naked eye, but one that infiltrates the soul, settles in the mind, and reshapes people's relationship with place, time, and each other. It is the war that makes a person fear the sound of a door, become startled at the hearing of a gunshot, hesitate before going out into the street, and calculate the distance between their home and the market as if planning to cross a military front. When they return home safely, they do not necessarily feel they have survived; rather, they begin waiting for the next danger. Thus, the city transforms from a space for living into a space for apprehension, and from a shared memory for people into a map of personal fears. Khartoum has not only lost its streets; it has begun to lose a part of the spirit that used to bring people together. Children who learn fear before life: The most difficult thing about war is that it does not suffice to steal people’s present; it also interferes with shaping their future. The child who should have been learning the names of trees, memorizing school songs, and arguing with friends over a game or a ball, finds themselves before another world; a world where they learn to distinguish between sounds, understand from the faces of adults when to be silent, when to stay away from the window, and why a moment of power outage becomes an additional cause for anxiety. Some children do not ask because they have understood what is happening, but because they are tired of questions that find no answers. Others watch the faces of their mothers and fathers in search of a sign that reassures them everything will be okay, while the adults themselves have nothing to offer but confused promises. What future awaits a child for whom knowing danger is more important than discovering the world? And what memory will remain in the mind of a generation whose childhood was linked to fear, displacement, and hunger, instead of playing, learning, and discovery? It is not just the loss of schools, desks, and books that is the catastrophe; the catastrophe is that fear turns into a permanent teacher, and children grow up believing that violence is a natural part of life and that weapons are the language that ends every disagreement. Women and the burden of daily survival: In Sudanese households, women bear a cruel share of this silent war. Between the fear for children, anxiety for the absent, managing food, medicine, and water, and trying to protect the family from news of death and loss, daily life becomes an endless arduous task. When food runs low, the mother is often the last to think of her share. When the power goes out, calculations begin for preserving what remains of the food, managing the household needs, and dealing with heat, darkness, and anxiety. When children hear a scary sound, she finds herself demanded to appear strong, even when her own heart is trembling more than theirs. How difficult it is for a person to be asked to be the source of reassurance for everyone, while they themselves find no one to reassure them! These are not side stories in the record of war; they are part of its social and human structure. The war that destroys power stations, markets, and hospitals does not stop its effects at the facilities; it enters kitchens and bedrooms, changes the distribution of roles within the family, and drains people's capacity for endurance. Hunger when it becomes a weapon against memory: Hunger is not just an empty stomach, nor is the rising price just a number changing in the market. When obtaining bread becomes a daily battle, a person's priorities shift, and the space they can allocate for thinking about politics, culture, and the future recedes. How do you ask a father who does not know how to provide a meal for his children to dedicate himself to discussing the form of the state? And how do you expect a mother who fears the pantry running out to feel stability? And how can a person regain their psychological balance while they do not know if they will find enough food and medicine for tomorrow? Poverty in wartime does not only mean a decrease in income; it means the collapse of the ability to plan. Tomorrow becomes unknown, savings turn into papers whose value is eroding, and the possessions people collected over long years become incapable of ensuring their basic needs. Then comes electricity, or rather its absence, to multiply all of this. Electrical current is not a luxury in a city exhausted by war; it is water reaching homes, medicine that needs refrigeration, communication through which the absent can reassure themselves about their loved ones, and an opportunity to regain something of the order of life. UN reports have pointed to the extensive damage inflicted on the electrical infrastructure in Greater Khartoum, and to the connection of restoring electricity to the operation of water, health facilities, markets, and communications. This confirms that restoring services is not a technical detail in the recovery phase, but a condition for restoring life itself. When memory becomes a burden: Cities have a memory that dwells in their small details. The smell of bread in the morning, the sound of vendors, familiar faces on the road, friends who can be visited without an appointment, cafes that accommodate people's differences, and houses whose doors remain open to neighbors. But war cuts these ties one after another. A person might pass by the house of an old friend and remember an uncompleted gathering, or pass through a street that used to be bustling with life and search with their eyes for faces whose paths they no longer know where they ended. They may find themselves unable to recall moments of old joy, not because they have disappeared completely, but because the present, full of fear, constantly crowds them out. It is a painful irony—we need memories to preserve ourselves, but some memories become painful because they remind us of a life that was possible, then suddenly cut short. Thus, war is no longer just a struggle for land or power; it becomes a struggle over meaning; over the ability of Sudanese people to remember that they used to live together, disagree together, and create dreams that go beyond just staying alive. Who imposes security on an armed city? Here we reach the most urgent question: Who can impose security in Khartoum? Security is not for the streets to be filled with gunmen, nor for the citizen to fear the checkpoint as much as they fear the unknown waiting for them after it. Security is not for people to be silent because they fear speaking, or to lock their doors because they do not trust who is knocking. Real security is for the citizen to be able to go out to buy bread without feeling they are risking their lives, for a child to go to school without their future hanging on developments in the field, for women and families to sleep without anticipating sudden sounds, and for people to resort to the law instead of a display of force. This is not achieved by merely deploying troops or issuing statements, but requires a responsible authority, a clear chain of command, accountability for violations, protection of civilians, control of arms, and securing roads, markets, and public facilities. It also requires that the citizen not be turned into a party required to prove loyalty to this gunman or that in order to obtain their right to life. A state that fails to protect people from violence cannot compensate for this deficit with political rhetoric about stability. For stability based on people's fear is not stability; it is a temporary silence waiting for the first spark to explode again. Restoring the human before restoring the buildings: Walls may be repaired, roads opened, some shops returned to work, and institutions may resume their services. But rebuilding the city will remain incomplete if it is not accompanied by serious work to restore people's sense of security, trust, and belonging. We need food, medicine, electricity, and water, and to open schools and hospitals, secure neighborhoods, and remove the debris of war. We also need to support families who have lost their sources of income, provide psychological and social care for the affected, create safe spaces for children and women, and bring life back to community initiatives that help people recover their ties. Talk of psychological recovery should not be understood as a call to forget what happened or to bypass accountability. Forced forgetting is not peace, silence is not reconciliation, and leaving victims alone with their pain is not rebuilding. One must acknowledge the losses, protect the right to know the truth, hold those responsible for violations accountable according to the law, and open the way for a reconciliation that does not cancel the rights of the victims nor force them to waive them. The city does not regain its soul just by residents returning to it, but when those residents feel they have a safe place in it, guaranteed rights, and a future that can be planned for. The Khartoum we want to restore is not just the Khartoum that was before the war, but the Khartoum where a child does not fear tomorrow, where a woman does not live on edge, and where a man does not measure his day by what he managed to survive. We want a city where the sound of life returns louder than the sound of weapons, where disagreement becomes a discussion rather than a threat, where political difference is a right rather than a cause for fear, and where a crust of bread becomes a right rather than a daily test of patience. For war may steal homes, dissipate wealth, and scatter families, but it should not take away from the Sudanese their right to imagine another life. That is the real challenge facing Khartoum—not just to return as a habitable city, but to return as a homeland that a person can inhabit without remaining afraid of it. zuhair.osman@aol.com