Will foreign forensic experts fulfill ‘iced dreams’ of 3K unidentified corpses in Khartoum morgues?

On April 8, the Omdurman Cultural Center in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, witnessed a theatrical performance titled “Iced Dream”, which dramatized the sad stories of unidentified corpses stacked in the refrigerators of Khartoum morgues. The audience's reaction was a mixture of sadness and laughter.

In the play, five corpses talk in a surreal tragicomedy way about their miserable conditions, being unidentified corpses, and expressing their only desire to be buried like the rest of the dead.

Since 2019, many believe that the bodies belong to missing persons who disappeared after the massacre of the sit-in of the General Command carried out by the regular forces in Khartoum in June 2019, which was denied by some responsible authorities.

Background

A few days after the massacre of the dispersal of the sit-in and the announcement of the loss of a number of demonstrators, a group of young people quickly formed the “Missing” initiative to help find the missing, following the announcement of many families that their children were missing.

In September 2019, the Transitional Sovereignty Council announced the formation of a joint committee comprising the Sudanese General Intelligence Service, families of missing persons, the police, the Missing initiative, the Ministry of Health, and lawyers. The aim of the committee is to search for the missing persons of the sit-in dispersal tragedy.

The missing persons and mortuaries became an issue of public opinion and led to the mass resignations of forensic officials in 2021 in protest against attempts by justice and health authorities to obliterate facts and evidence related to hundreds of bodies of unidentified individuals, tampering with the numbering of corpses, and burying corpses without completing the process of identifying their owners, while not allowing the families to identify the bodies.

In May 2022, the Families of the Missing Persons Assembly and the Missing Initiative demanded the suspension of the work of the Sovereign Committee and called for the assistance of an international team specialized in forensic medicine under the supervision of the Investigation Committee on the Disappearance of Persons of the Public Prosecution, provided that the latter be granted wide powers to ensure that other parties do not interfere in its work.

Earlier, the Ministry of Health in Khartoum announced that there were more than 3,000 unidentified bodies in morgues, dating back to the years 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Argentine experts

In July 2021, an Argentine team of three anthropologists and forensic experts, supported by USAID, arrived in the country to assist national investigators in some crimes at the request of the Committee on the Disappearance of Persons.

The team examined a mass grave likely to include the victims of the sit-in dispersal massacre, in addition to another grave of high school students who were killed while fleeing a military training camp in 1998, but the Public Prosecution obstructed its work, prevented it from visiting the morgues, and forced them to leave the country.

In early March 2023, the Sudanese government agreed to the return of the Argentine experts and the continuation of their work.

The legal adviser to the families of the missing, Othman Al-Basri, revealed that official procedures had begun between the Public Prosecution and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in preparation for the entry of the Argentine team into Sudan to autopsy the bodies piled up in all morgues.

Who is behind obstructing experts' work?

A representative of the families of the missing, who did not wish to be named, told Jusoor Post that they had begun procedures for the entry of the Argentine team’s first delegation to set dates and start work on dissecting the bodies that are piled up in the country’s morgues.

He revealed that they had communicated with the Argentine team, which numbered 36 experts in all fields of forensic medicine, adding that the delegation would arrive in order to find out the status of the morgues and set the start dates and stages of work.

“It was agreed between us and the Attorney General that an Argentine team should attend. Their passport data was sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to speed up entry procedures. However, some are keen on the international team not arriving because it would reveal information they want to hide,” he added.

The representative of the families of the missing criticized the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' delay in granting visas to the forensic experts and added that they made sure that the Attorney General sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to grant visas and that the latter informed them that the letter had arrived.

Journalist Salah Al-Alam stated to Jusoor Post, “The investigation committee into the disappearance of ‘missing’ persons affiliated with the Public Prosecution Office has doubts about the credibility of some forensic doctors and was previously forced to suspend some of them from work.”

“It is not only the illegal burial of the bodies of the victims of the sit-in massacre and the falsification of autopsy reports, but there are accusations of human organ trafficking,” he added.

‘Iced Dream’

In the final scenes of “Iced Dream”, unidentified corpses take to the empty streets of the city, only to discover that everyone has gone to war. Bodies bury each other and raise the white flag.