With the proclamation of Mursi as the new Egyptian President, it seems that the revolution of the Egyptian Arab Spring has triumphed. For now it seems that everything is good. In fact, Mursi has promised to be the president for all Egyptians without an exception. His claims appear to be serious: a woman and a Christian man will be the vice-presidents of the newly formed government, something that was unthinkable few months ago. However, we will have to wait to see if this will become a real fact.

Even though not all Egyptians agree with the elections that have taken place in their country, Egypt is the quintessential example of the triumph of the revolution this Arab spring. There has also been some progress in countries like Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, where the authoritarian Presidents, Ben Ali’s, Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh fell respectively. On the other side of the coin, are countries such as Syria and Morocco that are still fighting to overthrow the established system, and have to fight against the silence that surrounds these revolutions.

An example of the revolutions that have recently started is the case of Northern Sudan, which has more press now that Egypt has achieved their first goal. It seems that what started off being a small movement, has crystallized into a bigger mobilization.

According to www.sudaneseonline.com, the trigger has been the cuts that the Sudanese government has executed after the former South Sudan achieved their independence. After this, the Sudanese Government has suspended the gasoline subsidies, taxes have increased and thousands of civil servants have been fired.

Therefore, the Sudanese have gone out to the streets to protest, under the slogan of “We want the regime out.” They are demanding the resignation of the National Congress Party, Al-Bashir’s party, to be replaced by a transitional government that should represent all geographical regions of Sudan.

In the meantime, the police remain loyal to Al-Bashir, and he has ordered all his forces to stop the anti-government protests. Therefore, police have responded with attacks and detentions, and three newspapers have been shut down. It seems that the Internet will be a blackout sooner or later. In the meantime, Saata Ahmed al Hajj, General Secretary of the Sudanese Commission for the Defense of Freedoms and Rights, has been arrested.

But the Sudanese case is not an easy one, since there are other open fronts, which actually are more important. First off, there is the genocide in the western zone of Darfur that has been plaguing them for the last two decades. Sudan president, Omar Al-Bashir, who has been in power for more than two decades, has been giving help to the Janjaweed, the Arab militians that are perpetrating these terrible acts, and the citizens from the other parts of Sudan are finally complaining about it with demonstrations.

Secondly, the armed conflict between Sudan and the new Republic of South Sudan for oil control is at risk of turning into an open war. In 2005, these two sides of the country signed a peace agreement that ended a civil war for 22 years, dividing the country into two: the south, where two thirds of oil reserves are, and the north, which is developed. Both sides agreed to split revenues from oil production by half, but not one of them are complying with what they agreed.

Will we have a new success story like this in Egypt? Time will tell, but we must not forget these more important issues in Sudan.

Image Courtesy of  Oxfam International

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Do journalists get post traumatic stress from listening to victims of extreme violence?

Being a journalist in countries where rape is used as a weapon of war is no easy task. Interviewing victims and listening to their most traumatic experiences can have a toll on anyone.

It was the early 1990s, years before the international community would formally recognize that the Guatemalan government used systematic rape on its Mayan women. Victoria Sanford was pursuing an anthropology doctorate at Stanford University. Moved by the stories of her Mayan friends, Sanford joined the non-profit Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Investigative Team and went to Guatemala.

Though the team’s job was to exhume mass graves, Sanford talked to the women, who told other women about her, before she began recording their stories. Sanford joined a team of journalists who interviewed victims across the globe.

The stories of the experiences these women went through are painful, graphic and sad. One girl was raped in a Darfur refugee camp and made an amputee when her assailants tried to kill her by cutting off her arms and legs. The Kosovo women cried, screamed, and let out their rage as they told how soldiers climbed on top of them, choked and beat them, and did things too graphic to explain. The soldiers killed the babies that were the products of the rape in order to further torture these women.

Each interview took hours as the women explained every detail at great length. Some women smothered their own children in order to spare them from the brutality of the soldiers.

Through all the experiences these women told her, Sanford remained silent. She cried with them, hugged them and let them pour their souls. However, the stress began to get to Sanford. She had trouble breathing and sleeping. She couldn’t tell these women to stop telling their stories because the least thing these women could do is explain their experiences in hope that the world would hear.

After a while, Sanford began experiencing secondary trauma. The women she was interviewing called it “susto,” fright sickness.

One morning when Sanford awoke, she was paralyzed. She couldn’t move her neck or sit up. Her body locked up from the stress of the interviews. Psychiatrists explained that she had a temporary psychosomatic paralysis, a rare symptom linked to post-traumatic stress disorder and secondary trauma. Though she got better through treatment, Sanford returned back to interviewing.

PTSD is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that result in psychological trauma. Some of the symptoms include re-experiencing the original trauma through flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and increased arousal such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger and hyper-vigilance.

The traumas that these journalists face through interviewing are not from their own experiences, but that does not entail that the journalists cannot get PTSD. The paralysis that Sanford endured may be rare, but it shows that anyone can get it by just listening to the tragic experiences the victims explained in detail.

Image Courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53478302@N02/4943573594/sizes/z/in/photostream/

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