The ‘incredible journey’ of two Sudanese refugees
Wednesday, March 6th, 2019
“War-torn Sudan seems a world away from the quiet apartment in East Chattanooga Mohamed and Ibrahem now call home. The journey has been nothing short of incredible.
Mohamed, gracious and polite, quietly tells how local raids forced him to abandon the family farm. He then escaped, twice, from wretched conditions, beatings and constant threat of murder in the infamous refugee camp of Darfur.
Ibrahem, charismatic and a natural storyteller, speaks of how he was arrested and beaten for refusing to fight in Sudan’s ongoing civil war.
“I told them, ‘These are my people. How do I fight my own people?’” he says. He likely wouldn’t have survived the ordeal if not for a sympathetic jailer who helped him escape.
Both men had grown up on family farms in the Darfur region of Sudan, raising crops including rice, beans and potatoes. As a young boy, Ibrahem went off to school in Khartoum, living with his grandfather during the week and returning to his parents’ home in the town of Nyala, where his father worked for the railroad, on weekends.
As a young man, Ibrahem got a job at Khartoum International Airport. He went on to marry, he is now divorced, and have a son.
Embroiled in civil war since the 1980s, Sudan requires young men to undergo military training. For Ibrahem, that’s where the trouble began.
“They tried to force me to go to war,” he says. “There were Sudanese fighting Sudanese, Christians versus Muslims. I refused.”
He was arrested with three others and thrown into jail. He was tied hand to foot and, for 17 days straight, severely beaten.
Still, he refused their demands. “These are my people, why would I fight these people?” he kept repeating.
One evening, with a pre-arranged signal and assistance from one of the guards, Ibrahem slipped out of his jail cell, out of the jail, over the wall and into the first car he saw. He returned to his parents’ home, however conditions were too perilous to stay there either. In retribution for refusing to join the war against the Christians, militia were sent to Ibrahem’s village to steal land and confiscate livestock. Ibrahem decided to leave for Egypt. It was 1992.
Ten years went by, but little changed in Darfur.
In 2003, Mohamed and his family fled their land as houses were burned and farms ransacked. His father and younger brother were killed. The rest of the family, including Mohamed’s mother, brother and sister found themselves in the refugee camp, where he faced the constant threat of beatings and death. (Was this also because they wanted him to join the war?) His family urged him to run.
Mohamed hid in the back of a truck headed for Khartoum, where he was promptly arrested and beaten. He managed to escape jail and travel on to Egypt, where he worked for a while at a farm. He then set out on foot for Jordan.
But for Mohamed, it was one step forward, two steps back. He was arrested by Egyptian police again and transported back to the camp in Darfur.
Conditions there had not improved.
“I wanted to stay with my family, but if I’d stayed they would have killed me,” he says. He fled a second time, this time by car, taking the long route to Amman, avoiding checkpoints and police.
“I just wanted to stay somewhere there was a job, life and protection,” he says.
But for Ibrahem in Egypt and Mohamed in Jordan, that promise did not become reality. They could not live or work legally in either country, so both got by with what jobs they could find without proper documentation, living with other Sudanese who had also fled the unrest.
As the hope of returning home dimmed, they set their sights on finding a new one. In 1999 Ibrahem applied for refugee status. In 2003 his application was approved. And then he waited 15 years.
“I lost hope,” he says.
Mohamed applied for refugee status in 2013.
Now their circuitous journeys have brought them together in a small apartment in East Chattanooga. They look forward to improving their English, finding work, starting over.
“Everything is different here,” Mohamed says, of his first impressions. “I was so happy to be here. It was a new world.”
After the waiting, the struggle, the lost years, the loss, they can finally exhale. Ibrahem says he hopes to bring his son to the U.S. They both plan to support family left in Sudan.
“Everything’s ok,” Ibrahem says.