الباشمهندس أبوبكر سيد أحمد يتحدث لصحيفة ذي ناشونال عن مرارات التهجير لبناء السد العالي

Quote: “The High Dam contributed to two relocations,” says Sudanese-born Abubakr Sidahmed, a Nubian activist now living in Dubai. “A relocation in Egypt and a relocation in Sudan. It was a very tough and ugly experience to relocate people who had been living along the Nile banks for thousands of years and whose heritage, traditions and daily activities were related to water and the Nile. Then suddenly, they were moved aggressively and put in trains or ships with animals and taken, for example in Sudan, several hundred kilometres to the east in an area that was completely different and away from a river. The same thing happened to the Egyptians; they were removed from their areas along the river and from their nice beautiful decorated houses – each Nubian house has a reflection of honour, either through decoration or through colouring – and they were taken to a worse place, a place in the desert. After three years, the Egyptian government discovered that was the wrong place to relocate human beings and since then, the Nubians in Egypt have been fighting and fighting to get back to the Nile.” Sidahmed, a builder and architect by trade, who laments the slow erosion of Nubian culture and customs that have taken place due to the relocation, was born in Wadi Halfa, northern Sudan in 1948, and, though just a child at the time, can recall this episode of Nubian history well. “I left my family about three months before relocation because I had to go and join a secondary school in another town in the centre of Sudan. So, I remember when my family and all my village came in one train – a very long train – and it stopped in the station of that town and just imagine a small boy running all along this long train – here is the cousin, here is the aunty – and seeing all your village in a train heading east from Wadi Halfa, which was an awful experience. And, after a couple of months I travelled east to go and find my new village, and although I was young, I was shocked – all the houses were concrete yellow with no trees or nothing.” Sidahmed also argues that the High Dam was not the only solution to controlling the Nile’s floodwaters: “Eighty-five per cent of the water which goes to Egypt comes from the Ethiopian highlands so the water should have been stored in Ethiopia.” But not all Nubians harbour resentment towards the Egyptian government.