Nubians push to return to their drowned homeland

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jewel
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Nubians push to return to their drowned homeland

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And why ever not?

ASWAN, Egypt: Singing songs and chatting in an ancient language, hundreds of cheerful Nubian travelers gathered at the Alexandria railway station for a long pilgrimage to a lost homeland.
Exiles in their own country, they journeyed 18 hours to celebrate a Muslim holiday in the Nile Valley of southern Egypt, a region their ancestors once dominated from a loose confederation of villages along the river banks.
In 1964, their shoreline was inundated when the Aswan High Dam created Lake Nasser, the largest reservoir in the world. Now the Egyptian government has floated plans to develop and populate land surrounding the lake - without reserving space for Nubians. But ethnic minority activists want terrain set aside for new villages so their brethren can live again on the Nile, returning from a northern Egypt diaspora and arid settlements established 44 years ago for displaced families.
"The settlements are false Nubia," said Haggag Oddoul, an author who has become an outspoken advocate for resettlement. "To restore our character and community, we need to be rerooted. We need to return."
Nubians ruled Egypt in pharaonic times, their armies having ousted Libyan invaders. They speak their own, non-Arabic language and sing songs to drum beats. The river was their economic lifeblood and fountain of memory, identity and lore. Central to old beliefs, it held the spirits of angels and holy men.
"The Nile is our mother," said Fikri el-Kashef, a Nubian singer who built a home atop a ridge above his flooded boyhood village of Abu Simbel.
Giant statues of Pharaoh Ramses II once gazed down on his backyard. The monuments were moved to high ground nearby when the Soviet allies of Egypt were building the dam, which currently provides 14 percent of the country's electrical energy.

The project displaced 60,000 Nubians. They left with hope for a better life and anxiety about what they were leaving behind.
"The government promised us paradise, but we thought we were leaving the Garden of Eden," said Oddoul, 64, author of "Nights of Musk," a collection of short stories about old Nubia.
Paradise turned out to be a string of 30 hastily built villages eight kilometers, or five miles, east of the Nile to the north of Aswan city, each named for a drowned hamlet. Some of the one-story houses soon cracked or collapsed from faulty masonry. And the Nubians did not see sugar cane and cotton crops as adequate replacements for the fruit, dates and fish of their original homeland.
Longing for place after protracted dislocation is a feature of much controversy and conflict in the Middle East. Kurds in Iraq seek to claim the city of Kirkuk, an oil hub they regard as their capital and from which tens of thousands were expelled by Saddam Hussein.
Kurdish citizens of Syria and Turkey are arguing that they should be allowed to return to places from where they were removed because of what the authorities called security reasons stemming from civil strife. Palestinians want at least a token "right of return" to places of origin inside Israel from which they fled during that nation's 1948 war for independence.
Recent conflicts in Iraq, Yemen, Algeria and Lebanon have driven millions from their homes, according to an April report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a group based in Geneva that tracks refugee movements.
Nubians, about 3 million of Egypt's 73 million people, have been leaving their stretch of the Nile Valley for more than a century - some because of poverty, some because of efforts to tame the river's annual floods.
The organized campaign to return to the banks of the Nile is recent. Oddoul started the debate when, in 2005, he spoke to a group of Egyptian Christians in Washington and compared treatment of the Nubians to ethnic cleansing. Newspapers in Egypt called him a traitor.
Nubians have darker skin than Egyptians from the north. In the country's films, they are portrayed as house servants, porters - and stupid.
"It's a stereotype based on us being black," said Tarek Agha, 40, a restaurant owner in Aswan.
Oddoul said he spoke sharply because of government plans to settle northern Egyptians along Lake Nasser without reserving space for Nubians. More recently, newspapers reported plans for agricultural and tourist developments on about 121,400 hectares, or 300,000 acres. Some space would be designated for foreign investors, the rest would be for domestic developers - with nothing for Nubians.
Oddoul and a committee of Nubian leaders are lobbying the governor of Aswan Province for 100,000 acres to be divided between 5,000 recent Nubian college graduates and 5,000 families who he says never received the homes they were promised in 1964. The governor's press office said that the request has been sent to the central government but that no decision has been made yet.
"We want new old Nubia," Oddoul said. "We're not against other Egyptians settling on the lake or development. We don't suggest all Nubians should go back. It's unrealistic. But why should we be left out?"

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/23/ ... letter.php


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