Ghost Houses Wiki page

SUDAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION,


 33rd Annual Conference



Sudan and South Sudan: Boundaries, Borders and the Challenges of Nationhood



 
 University of San Francisco, CA

May 23rd, 24th and 25th 2014


Using Collaborative Data to Expose Torture in Sudan

Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim, Springfield College (MA)

Nahid Abunama-Elgadi, Amnesty International (CA)

  

When you Google ‘Ghost Houses in Sudan’ the first pages to appear are Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International (AI), and Group Against Torture in Sudan (GATS). However, there is no information available on Wikipedia (Wiki); one of the world’s largest applications for collaborative data. As two human rights activists in the education field, we feel it is necessary to launch a Wiki page to expose this crime worldwide and make authentic data available to researchers in academia.

  

Why are they called Ghost Houses? Who runs them? Are they mobile or permanent fixtures? What’s the justification of torture presented by the regime from an Islamic viewpoint? Who are the torturers? Do Ghost Houses continue to exist? These are just a few of the many questions the immigration lawyers and judges found themselves struggling with. Having this page will connect the US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (formerly known as INS) to torture survivors and in turn help its officers better understanding the asylum seekers and provide them with appropriate needed assistance.

From the notorious ‘White House’ in Juba to the infamous ‘Citibank Ghost House’ in Khartoum, the ‘Holy Qur’an College’s Ghost House’ in Omdurman to the Ghost House inside the mosque of the HQ for Security Apparatus in Nyala, S. Darfur; the places of government-organized torture centers in Sudan will be examined in this paper. We hope that in having a global page of collective data, testimonials, location maps and history briefings, we will be able to help researchers, and shed more lights on this crime.