First he and his friends organized the charity organization Husky (meaning light in the Hausa language) which helped people from the tribe defend their right to an education. He studied so well that the first year was exempt from payment.Īged 19 the young Omar started to do charity work. However, Omar Bashir insisted on both working and learning and enrolled in a private school. However, it embarrassed the family and after three years his enraged uncle came to take him back to Khartoum in order to start earning some money. Officially Omar, like his father, was a Muslim but the Christian outlook of the school didn’t bother him. The opportunity for this arose when, aged 13, Omar Bashir went to school at the Episcopal Church in Port Sudan. As a child with Hausa and Fulani parents the school didn’t want to take him, but Omar was desperate to learn. With nothing to live on he started working part-time when he was 6 by selling packets for vegetables at the market.
Omar’s parents divorced and left for new families. This means that any Darfurian is in danger of falling into the hands of the Sudanese security forces that are known for their brutality and impunity. Moreover, because the Darfurians are fighting for equal rights with the Arab population of Sudan, the fact of belonging to one of these tribes is, in the eyes of the authorities, a basis for suspicion of links with the revolutionary movements. In practice this means that people from these tribes are denied access to education and other social benefits whist human rights activists trying to help risk ending up in prison.
Some of the manifestations of this discrimination include…a lack of real social guarantees to these groups by the State and obstacles faced by foreign and Sudanese humanitarian organizations trying to work with these communities. According to the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences ‘discrimination of the Hausa, Fulani and Kanuri takes place both at the domestic level…and in the relationship between the authorities and society. This was an unlucky combination as in Sudan both the Hausa and Fulani are strongly oppressed by the government, as are others from Darfur. His father was from the Hausa tribe and his mother from the Fulani tribe. Omar was born in January 1985 in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, into a family of immigrants from North Darfur.
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