..From the Podium.. Yasser Al-Fadni
Daqris… The Place Where Militias Bury People Alive
In Daqris, the tragedy does not begin at the gate…
It begins when the door shuts, and a person realizes that their name no longer matters, and that their life can be erased without witnesses, without a single question.
Daqris is not a prison.
A prison presumes law, guilt, and a defined punishment.
But Daqris is a void of mercy, a place designed to break a human being slowly, until they forget their voice, their face, even the name their mother called them at birth.
There, in western Nyala, bodies pile up like forgotten objects.
Cramped cells, mingled breaths, hunger that cannot be sated, illness with no helping hand.
Some die because they fell ill…
Some die because they starved…
Some die because the waiting stretched beyond what the body could endure.
In Daqris, screams are not heard for long.
Sound is defeated quickly, and pain turns into silence.
A heavy silence, resembling acceptance of death without resistance, because resistance itself has become a luxury.
The tragedy is that many entered Daqris without charge, without trial, without farewell.
Those who leave—if they leave—emerge changed in ways that cannot be undone:
Their gaze, their trust, their sense of safety.
Others never leave at all…
Their names remain suspended in memory, their bodies vanished without graves.
Daqris is not just a wound in Darfur;
It is a wound in the very idea of the nation.
A place that tests how far a human can be humiliated,
And how long the world can remain silent.
Mothers do not know if their children are alive or mere numbers.
Children wait for fathers who may never return.
And the country moves on as if nothing happened,
As if death behind walls does not count as death.
From my podium I look… and I say:
One day, this story will be told in full,
And it will be said that there is a place in Sudan called Daqris,
Where the aim was not punishment…
But to break the human being to the very end.
