MER Article The Famine This Time Gayle Smith coordinates the Africa program at the Washington-based Development Group for Alternative Policies. In the past ten years she has worked extensively in the Horn of Africa on relief and development issues. Her most recent trip to Ethiopia and Sudan was in June 1990. She spoke with Joe Stor Gayle Smith • 7 min read
MER Article Absolute Distress Most discussion of the food crisis in Africa is a model in which subsistence economies remain essentially intact and food insecurity is a transitory phenomenon, the result of external factors such as drought or war which temporarily upset the normal balance between sufficiency and dearth. My experie Mark Duffield • 21 min read
MER Article Mediations Intifada Chic We’re not really sure what this tells us about the present state of the Israeli Jewish psyche, almost two years into the intifada, but here are some of the designer T-shirts being sold these days in Jerusalem: Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article Khartoum Diary July 25 The predawn landing, with the swollen Nile below and a touch of freshness in the air, feels reassuring after two years away from Sudan. But at the airport exit a nervous officer holds back the passengers: security is tight since the inqilab, he mutters, using the Arabic word for “overthrow” Ann Lesch • 8 min read
MER Article Sudan's Killing Fields In 1988 Sudan reaped its best harvest in at least a decade, yet as many as half a million Sudanese may have died of starvation. Most were victims of the civil war raging in the southern provinces, and anarchy in the west. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the war zones, seeking refuge in cam Jay O'Brien • 12 min read
MER Article Medical Education: The Struggle for Relevance A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. Cynthia Myntti • 11 min read
MER Article Birth (Al-Maulid) BIRTH (AL-MAULID) Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub (1921-1982) Hand on the Prophet, God Help and support me with him who speaks for the people on Judgment Day -- with him who drinks pure water from al-Kauthar, Paradise river. On the square’s other side clear light spreads a rainbow of hope and jo Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub • 2 min read
MER Article The Wing of the Patriarch The relationship of women’s emancipation to liberation parties or movements raises a number of questions. The basic one is whether or not women are making their own revolution in their own name or being handed it by “another revolution.” [1] Sondra Hale • 20 min read
MER Article Mahmoud, The Sudanese Bourgeoisie Fatima Babiker Mahmoud, The Sudanese Bourgeoisie, (London: Zed Press and Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1984). Cindi Katz • 2 min read
MER Article Letter from a Devastated Land I arrived in Khartoum on April 15, nine days after the coup, as soon as the borders opened. In Cairo, I had watched film clips of the noisy, jubilant crowds that had brought down Numairi, but Khartoum was eerily silent now. The high of the revolution" had given way to the sense of crisis that once a Ellen Cantarow • 8 min read
MER Article George Bush in Khartoum Khartoum. The hand-painted sign on Nile Avenue here best captured the attitude of urban Sudanese toward the visit of Vice President George Bush to their country in early March, just four weeks before the popular overthrow of President Ja‘far Numairi. “Vice-President and Mrs. Bush,” read the sign, “a Gayle Smith • 7 min read
MER Article The Generals Step In Mass demonstrations in Khartoum at the end of March 1985 initiated a series of events which culminated in the overthrow of President Ja‘far Numairi’s regime in Sudan by the Sudanese military. What began as popular protest against increases in the price of basic commodities was transformed within a w Abdallah el-Hassan, Abbas Abdelkarim, David Seddon • 15 min read
