Fatma Naib

A long battle ahead for Egyptian women

On International Women’s Day, women rights activists in Egypt called for a one million women march at Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

I arrived in Tahrir around 2pm local time [12GMT] on Tuesday March 8, but was surprised to see the sheer volume of men who outnumbered the women, as if it was International Men’s Day!

However, as the crowd trickled in, it grew into hundreds but very far from the planned one million!

Ironically, the few women, I came across in the beginning, were oblivious of the fact that it was a women's day march.

Mission UN-impossible

The journey into Darfur started at the break of dawn. I was greeted at the UN airport in Khartoum by personnel who ensured I made it onto the plane.

As we waited in the freezing cold in the open air waiting area, I started to observe the truly international faces around me - Ethiopians, Nigerians and Bulgarians. 

The plane finally arrived. An hour and a half later, the captain announced that we were in Al Fashir, Darfur.

Sudan's lost unity

A day after Sudan marked the 55th anniversary of its independence from British ruling, Jalaa al-Azhari, the daughter of Sudan's first president Ismali al-Azhari, marked the event by half raising the flag. A sign of sadness at the state of the nation in the light of the looming referendum that could see Africa's largest country split in two halves.

As I entered the big former presidential building, I looked up to see the old Sudanese flag with the green, yellow and black colours raised in half. I sensed the somber atmosphere as I looked around the courtyard that had big banners with her father's pictures on the flag with the slogan: A nation that includes everyone.

As the team arrived at the house, kindergarden children started arriving to pay their respect to the first president of Sudan, seeing them diffused the sad mood, it was a moment that exhumed innocence.

Al-Turabi arrested, again

The power struggle between Hassan al-Turabi, the Sudanese opposition politician, and his former ally Omar al-Bashir, the country's president, shows no signs of ending.

If anything, it could well be intensifying, judging by the late-night arrest on Saturday of al-Turabi.

He has been in and out of custody during his political career - one marked by remarkable shifts in allegiances.

In the last few years, while in the opposition, al-Turabi has been imprisoned or held under house arrest on several occasions.

His relationship with al-Bashir was, of course, not always antagonistic.

Indeed, they were very close in the past: al-Turabi was one of al-Bashir's most trusted advisers when the latter seized power in 1989.

Al-Turabi was then the chairman of al-Bashir's National Congress Party (NCP).

But the two split over the introduction of a bill to limit the president's powers in 1999, a move which al-Bashir countered by dissolvi