مجموعة أجندة مفتوحة تنعي لشعبنا وفاة عبد السلام حسن الفاجعة
-
إدارة الموقع
- مشاركات: 394
- اشترك في: الأربعاء مايو 11, 2005 3:10 pm
-
ÍÓä ãÍãÏ ÓÚíÏ
- مشاركات: 465
- اشترك في: الاثنين أغسطس 08, 2005 2:58 pm
-
Enshrah Ahmed
- مشاركات: 122
- اشترك في: الخميس مايو 12, 2005 6:27 pm
The below article is written by the British leading Journalist Ms. Julie Flint who has known Abdelsaalm very well and for quite a while
The article is published by the Middle East International Magazine this morning
Gentle giant felled in exile
With the murder of Abdel Salam Hassan Abdel Salam on 13 March, Sudan has lost one of its most tenacious human rights advocates and incisive critics of political Islam. The Sudanese community in Britain has lost a loved and respected figure – author, activist, lawyer and, most unusually for a Sudanese, resolute vegetarian (exception made for fish).
The tragic irony of Abdel Salam’s brutal killing, aged only 56, in his small ground-floor flat in the London borough of Lewisham, was
highlighted by Detective Chief Inspector Damian Allain, the police officer now leading a murder inquiry. Abdel Salam, he said, had devoted much of his life to combating the abuses of the human rights of others. A neighbour called him a “gentle giant”, someone who “would always say hello”.
In a tense pre-election period, Abdel Salam’s death sent shock waves through the Sudanese expatriate community. A number of Sudanese had received anonymous text messages in the preceding days claiming, falsely, that a leading challenger to President Omar al-Bashir, Yasir Arman, had been killed. Police say they “retain an open mind” about the motive for the murder, which acquaintances of Abdel Salam are linking to bullying and harassment by local youths – both on the street and in a number of burglaries and attempted burglaries.
A devout secularist, Abdel Salam left Sudan after the National Islamic Front (NIF) seized power in June 1989. He was a member of the Baath party in Sudan until 1978 and after that joined the Sudanese Communist Party. In exile, he focused on rights issues and on exposing, with rigorous scholarship, the hypocrisy of political Islam. (One of his role models was Farag Foda, the Egyptian thinker, columnist and human rights activist who was murdered in June 1992 by two members of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya.) It was Abdel Salam’s merciless dissection of the intellectual bankruptcy of political Islam, more than his human rights work, that riled the NIF.
In London in 1990, Abdel Salam chaired the Sudan Human Rights Organisation, re-organised in exile. He later worked with Justice Africa, analysing Sudanese jihadism for a chapter co-authored with Alex de Waal in Islamism and its Enemies in the Horn of Africa. It was he who coined the now-familiar term al-mashru’ al-medani (the civil project) in response to the Islamists’ al-mashru’ al-hadhari (the civilisation project) that focused on the elevation of Arab values and culture (including, in practice, through violence).
Deadlines, organisation and timing were not Abdel Salam’s strong points. But he charmed his way out of trouble, on one occasion telling a colleague who chided him for arriving four hours later for a midday meeting: “But somewhere in the world it is 12 o’clock!”
“Abdel Salam was always a delight to see because he always had an angle on everything that was a little deeper than anyone else yet at the same time was very human,” de Waal said. “Just to sit down with him was to be exposed to a machine of insights.”
Although divorced, Abdel Salam remained close to his former wife, Wafa Mahmoud Hussein, with whom he had a daughter, Azza. He longed to return to live in a democratic Sudan and visited the country last year as legal advisor to the Redress Trust, with whom he began working in 2007. Most recently he was acting as advisor for a law-reform project aimed at reforming Sudan’s criminal justice system. Regretting the death of a “beloved colleague and friend”, Redress paid tribute not only to Abdel Salam’s leading role in the struggle for human rights and justice in Sudan over the last three decades, but also to “the conviviality with which he enriched our daily lives.”
Julie Flint
The article is published by the Middle East International Magazine this morning
Gentle giant felled in exile
With the murder of Abdel Salam Hassan Abdel Salam on 13 March, Sudan has lost one of its most tenacious human rights advocates and incisive critics of political Islam. The Sudanese community in Britain has lost a loved and respected figure – author, activist, lawyer and, most unusually for a Sudanese, resolute vegetarian (exception made for fish).
The tragic irony of Abdel Salam’s brutal killing, aged only 56, in his small ground-floor flat in the London borough of Lewisham, was
highlighted by Detective Chief Inspector Damian Allain, the police officer now leading a murder inquiry. Abdel Salam, he said, had devoted much of his life to combating the abuses of the human rights of others. A neighbour called him a “gentle giant”, someone who “would always say hello”.
In a tense pre-election period, Abdel Salam’s death sent shock waves through the Sudanese expatriate community. A number of Sudanese had received anonymous text messages in the preceding days claiming, falsely, that a leading challenger to President Omar al-Bashir, Yasir Arman, had been killed. Police say they “retain an open mind” about the motive for the murder, which acquaintances of Abdel Salam are linking to bullying and harassment by local youths – both on the street and in a number of burglaries and attempted burglaries.
A devout secularist, Abdel Salam left Sudan after the National Islamic Front (NIF) seized power in June 1989. He was a member of the Baath party in Sudan until 1978 and after that joined the Sudanese Communist Party. In exile, he focused on rights issues and on exposing, with rigorous scholarship, the hypocrisy of political Islam. (One of his role models was Farag Foda, the Egyptian thinker, columnist and human rights activist who was murdered in June 1992 by two members of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya.) It was Abdel Salam’s merciless dissection of the intellectual bankruptcy of political Islam, more than his human rights work, that riled the NIF.
In London in 1990, Abdel Salam chaired the Sudan Human Rights Organisation, re-organised in exile. He later worked with Justice Africa, analysing Sudanese jihadism for a chapter co-authored with Alex de Waal in Islamism and its Enemies in the Horn of Africa. It was he who coined the now-familiar term al-mashru’ al-medani (the civil project) in response to the Islamists’ al-mashru’ al-hadhari (the civilisation project) that focused on the elevation of Arab values and culture (including, in practice, through violence).
Deadlines, organisation and timing were not Abdel Salam’s strong points. But he charmed his way out of trouble, on one occasion telling a colleague who chided him for arriving four hours later for a midday meeting: “But somewhere in the world it is 12 o’clock!”
“Abdel Salam was always a delight to see because he always had an angle on everything that was a little deeper than anyone else yet at the same time was very human,” de Waal said. “Just to sit down with him was to be exposed to a machine of insights.”
Although divorced, Abdel Salam remained close to his former wife, Wafa Mahmoud Hussein, with whom he had a daughter, Azza. He longed to return to live in a democratic Sudan and visited the country last year as legal advisor to the Redress Trust, with whom he began working in 2007. Most recently he was acting as advisor for a law-reform project aimed at reforming Sudan’s criminal justice system. Regretting the death of a “beloved colleague and friend”, Redress paid tribute not only to Abdel Salam’s leading role in the struggle for human rights and justice in Sudan over the last three decades, but also to “the conviviality with which he enriched our daily lives.”
Julie Flint