10 May 2024 | Africa, News and features, Sudan
Atar, a digital magazine distributed via email and WhatsApp, first came to my attention late last October. I was in a dimly lit New York cafe, warmed by the company of a group of Sudanese diaspora; artists, activists, journalists, nursing hot teas and wounded souls. As it often does, the question of obtaining high quality Sudani news bubbled up. “Have you heard about Atar yet?’ someone asked. I hadn’t, yet. But this interaction was instructive. With their formal website still under construction, word-of-mouth was one of the main ways this weekly Arabic (bi-monthly English) magazine was being found.
An initiative of the non-for-profit Sudan Facts Center for Journalism Services – founded by veteran journalist Arif Elsaui – Atar began publishing on 12 October 2023, six months into the war against civilians in Sudan. Co-managing director Amar Jamal told Index it was a project borne of necessity.
“We had been talking about theory for a long time,” Jamal said. “But with the current situation, we realised there won’t be any more media outlets in Sudan left.”
Sudan Facts Center had been running fellowships for young professional journalists, but the crisis spurred them into pushing forward with their greater ambitions. “If we were going to wait until the perfect conditions, we would be waiting a long time. Let us start, and improve as we go along,” Jamal noted.
Since October, the Atar team has produced 28 Arabic editions and four in English. Inspired by The Continent, another popular African digital news magazine, Atar – with the tagline “Sudan in Perspective” – is currently distributed through Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal and email.
“There hasn’t been a day when our distribution list hasn’t grown,” Jamal said.
Stories range from investigations into “Sudan’s labyrinth of torture centres” to the stories of those fleeing the war north through Egypt. Early editions reported on the daily experiences of Sudanese people during the conflict, how they “eat, drink and sleep” and their “daily heroism”, while more recent releases focus on the mutual aid infrastructure keeping people alive.
Not only was the content of the story important to get right, Jamal said, but the voice and tone of the publication was given thorough consideration.
“We stay away from tragic language. While we are writing about death, we write about it with heroism.” Not necessarily out of a desire to give readers hope, “but to give people an encouraging word”.
Atar began with three editors in Nairobi – Arif Elsaui, Amar Jamal and Mohammed Alsadiq – and four correspondents. The first releases were focused on the written word, delivering vital information via dense blocks of text, not unlike the traditional Sudanese newspaper. But this model changed after the team took stock 10 weeks into the project. Over the new year period, “we took a break to review the structure and design, expand our pool of reporters, institutionalise the project so it wouldn’t fail,” Amar said.
Today, Atar is delivered by 24 reporters and seven editors. The growth is palpable, not only in the range of stories, but in their design. The structure and voice of Atar is unique, deliberately so. “This is not a newspaper, delivering daily stories,” Amar makes clear. Atar is focused on analysis, curation, about showing the verification and the context for your average reader to make sense of unfolding events.
“The need for a newspaper has changed in the age of social media,” said Jamal, noting that in an age of camera phones, the recording of events has been democratised.
“What is needed now is the verification and context. That is our ambition. Respecting the intellect of the Sudanese reader, and presenting material that yes, might be difficult, but it has value. The value it has is in its truth.”
Atar is providing a home for fact-based news in a prohibitive information landscape. There are few players in Sudan today, fewer still after the state suspended operations of three satellite channels this April, Saudi state-owned broadcasters Al Arabiya and Al Hadath and UAE-owned Sky News Arabia.
“All of the correspondents that we began with have had to leave the country,” Amar admitted. “It’s very difficult to write from the inside.” But difficult is not impossible, and Atar consistently manages to publish original stories from the ground.
“Sometimes, stories are written under the Atar byline to protect the journalist,” Jamal said, describing how their local correspondents find ways to contact sources and file stories even in the most challenging circumstances. “Even when the internet was cut off,” he said. “You just adjust your investigative style.”
Atar’s popularity now means that they are regularly approached by writers, reporters and potential sources as an outlet for news, with some sending in fully written pieces for publication. Atar pride themselves on having an open-door policy, allowing anyone to submit material via phone or email, but only work that goes through their fact-checking system will be included in the magazine. The volume of engagement and interest is a “scream from the people,” Jamal said. Even a 14-year-old girl sent a piece with some news. These are people’s voices who are not heard and Atar wants to be a home for them.
Such grounded local reporting cultivates intense loyalty and support, such as in the case of the small island of Dagarti. “It has maybe only 300, 400 inhabitants,” Jamal said. “Nobody had written about these people before. But when our journalist went to do a follow-up story, she said the whole island waits for Thursday so they can read Atar.”
What next for Atar? The team has big ambitions. Their English-language edition was always part of the plan, because “it isn’t just the Sudanese reader that cares about Sudan.” They have recently moved into a new, larger office in Nairobi, with talk of a live studio arm, events and more. Their approach is experimental, and with enough funding in the bank for the moment, Jamal is excited about the future.
Jamal is not the only one. If this is what the Sudanese people can do in the most inhospitable of circumstances, imagine the possibilities once the war is over.
17 Jan 2024 | Israel, News and features, Palestine
Wael al-Dahdouh, the al-Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza, has become the symbol of the suffering of Palestinian journalists. Footage of him continuing to work after an Israeli airstrike killed his wife, two of his children and a grandson gained global attention in October. His suffering was compounded this month when his son, Hamza, also a journalist, was killed in a targeted drone attack. This week 53-year-old Wael left Gaza for treatment on an injury sustained during a strike last month that left an al-Jazeera cameraman dead.
Youmna el-Sayed, the al-Jazeera English correspondent in Gaza, was very close to both Wael and his son Hamza. Speaking from Cairo, where she and her family were evacuated this month, she told Index: “I consider Wael as an older brother while Hamza is, or was, younger than me. He was a very nice and kind person. He was loved by everyone. If you go to the Gaza Strip and speak about Hamza, no one will tell you anything bad about him… And Hamza was always there. With us at all times. I saw him every day.”
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has produced documentation to show that Hamza al-Dahdouh took money from the terrorist group Islamic Jihad and that his colleague, Mustafa Thuraya, also killed in the airstrike, was a member of Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade.
El-Sayed said she did not accept the IDF’s version of events: “Israel has made so many claims before but has produced no strong and solid proof or evidence other than just claims that it has given out to the public.”
She said she didn’t know Thuraya but could vouch for Hamza. “I know him very well. I was at his wedding last winter so I know the whole family very well. I know who Hamza is, and I know he’s not associated with any of the Palestinian factions or fighters. Hamza was a journalist.”
As for Wael al-Dahdouh himself, el-Sayed said the veteran correspondent was driven by his faith to continue reporting despite his personal grief. “Despite the killing of his family, he went back on air to pursue his message because, for him, it’s a duty. He’s not just doing it because he’s al-Jazeera correspondent. He’s doing it because it has so many other meanings deeper than that. He tells me this is a duty I will be asked upon from God before anyone else.”
El-Sayed said she spoke to al-Dahdouh after the death of his son: “I gave him my condolences. And I know Wael is a very strong person. But that day, he cried when he spoke to me, and I was already crying. I told him, ‘I don’t even know what to tell you. Hamza wasn’t just your son. He was my brother’. He told me, ‘Hamza loved you very much, you know. He always spoke about you even after you evacuated’. That really pricked my heart because Hamza was like a younger brother to me. We always joked and we always spoke together and we discussed everything that was going on.”
Since the war began more than 83 journalists have been killed, the majority killed in Gaza, according to the CPJ. Of these, 76 are Palestinian, four Israeli, and three Lebanese. The CPJ have called it the deadliest conflict for journalists on record. The IDF insists that it is targeting terrorists and that many of those victims identified as journalists are in fact militant fighters. But Youmna el-Sayed does not believe this. “Many of the journalists in the Gaza Strip were targeted in their homes. Hamza was targeted along with Mustafa in their car directly — after three months of this war. How can people associated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad… be left freely to move around and work as journalists in every targeted area for over three months?”
With experienced journalists such as Youmna el-Sayed and Wael al-Dahdauh forced to leave Gaza, it is difficult to imagine how the world will ever find out what is really happening on the ground.
“I’m a mother with four children. I’m married. Like any other war, of course, any escalation that breaks out in the Gaza Strip, it’s our first mission to cover what’s happening,” said el-Sayed. But this war was different. “Everything was happening so quickly. The war wasn’t just in limited areas or on a certain sector or against a certain group. Our families, like any other person in the Gaza Strip, were in constant danger all the time. It was the constant worry about my family and my kids and are they safe or not. It’s very challenging. It was a struggle I had never lived before.”
As a reporter in Gaza, el-Sayed had to negotiate not just the Israeli bombardment but working in territory ruled by Hamas. “If you have watched my reporting, I will tell you that every single thing that happens in the Gaza Strip from Hamas I report it as neural, as I had seen it. I tried to be as objective as I can because it’s a moral duty.”
She added: “My first reporting on 7 October was about the barrages of rockets that were fired from the Gaza Strip and from different areas and the unprecedented attack that we have witnessed from Gaza and from the Palestinian fighting groups in the Gaza Strip against the Israeli towns. So, I’m not going to shut my eyes about what is happening in the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian fighters or Palestinian factions simply because I’m a Palestinian journalist reporting from Gaza. Then I’m not a journalist.”
At the same time, she said the actions of Hamas should not prevent her from reporting what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza. “I’m not supposed to be only reporting what is happening from or within Gaza, from Hamas against Israel, and totally turning a blind eye towards what’s happening in the Gaza Strip from the Israeli army. That’s not being impartial. That’s just giving one side of the story against the other.”
El-Sayed finally decided to make the difficult decision to leave Gaza because she no longer felt her family was safe. She had already been displaced five times before she finally evacuated to Egypt. “But I’m only here with my body,” she said. “My heart and my mind are totally in the Gaza Strip. I’m just in front of the news every single hour. I’m always looking at my phone, checking the news websites on a minute-by-minute basis to see what is happening there. And at the same time, I’m very much heartbroken and worried about the people, my friends that are there, my colleagues, everyone that I have left there. But at the end, I had to choose between being a journalist and continuing to pursue my job and being a mother with four children, who I need to look out for their lives. And this is the only reason why I had to leave.”
