"A Darfur Capital" a Nyala Travel Page by sebblit7

When I was last here about two years ago it was a dusty one horse town. Well it still is! But finally they have hotels to speak of. The electrical power station just outside town reminded me of something from The Sims, weird to see all that smoke in the air, just outside town, burning day and night as it feeds the two power grids that I'm told of. Apparently the first power grid is only for those rich and powerful enough to be on it, so it doesn't get switched off as much as the 2nd power grid. Since it goes down at least once a day I'd hate to be one of those reliant on the second power grid.

Anyway things have changed for NGO's, UN and journo's here quite dramatically.

If you want to travel outside town (i.e. to any of the refugee camps) it means going beyond the military checkpoints, and, as in the past, you must visit the local HAC, in any of the three Darfur capitals of Nyala, Al Fashir and El Geneina in order to get written permission to do so. Remember to make many photocopies of this written permission (as well as copies of your passport, the visa page with the clearance stamp for local immigration, your Sudanese press pass and the letter you got from the Sudan External Info Council) so you can give all this documentation to the guys at the checkpoints.

That still remains the same, but what has changed is the gravity of the situation, while things have improved since the huge international presence, i.e restaurants, hotels and some pretty decent internet connections, it's become a rather nasty place to get things done.

And the camps are looking rather more permanent, instead of the usual blue UN sheeting and woodstick poles most dwelling are now mud and mudbrick

The local authorities are particularly hostile against everyone, African Union (AU) forces, UN, NGO's and journalists. It's sad to see that the Sudanese authorities have not only embedded themselves so deeply in the AU forces that they attend every meeting they hold, but they have also effectively managed to impose a night time curfew... on the AU... so they cannot actually do their job because most of the raping and pillaging goes on at night.

If you're a TV News journo you'll be intersted to hear that when I met Ramattan recently (on 22 Oct '06) in Khartoum they told us that to supplement the uplink they already have in Al Fashir they plan to bring a dish to Nyala and El Geneina within the next few weeks. go look here http://www.ramattan.com/

Filming any military, military vehicles, bridges, dams, airports, etc will get you into a whole lot of trouble. We found this out the hard way and had a tape confiscated. A few hours of filming in the morning, followed by over 4 hours of interrogation as they looked at every single tape we had shot, wasted a whole day for us.

And no we weren't being silly idiots driving around with all our tapes in our posession, they escorted our cameraman back to the hotel where he was made to produce every single tape we had shot from his locked luggage in his locked room.

Unfortunately we were shooting in a few formats, and the old minidv tapes we were recording over (containing footage from many other African countries) came under real scrutiny as they believed that all the material was shot in Sudan, it was a real headache.

WFP are now onto giving half rations of food because they don't have enough money to keep everyone fed

Don't naively believe that the AU forces are all your friends. The Sudanese army and SLA/M army guys are now embedded with them, so watch what you say to them because ears are wide open everywhere and the Sudanese army guys/SLA/M are in total control.

Hint: the Sudanese army guys and SLA/M guys (who are now on the same side) are very easy to recoginse they use permanant markers on their lapels to draw stars that mark their rank (titter... but not in front of them)