From Muscat came this week an announcement small in its words, large in its meaning: the Embassy of Sudan to the Sultanate of Oman will cover the transport of the stranded free of charge via Sudan's national airlines — those whose visit visas have expired or whose residencies have lapsed and who were unable to renew them — during the grace period for waiving fines set by the competent Omani authorities for all violators, with a call for those concerned to register with the embassy or with the delegates of the Supreme Committee for Voluntary Return in the various governorates to benefit from the period before it lapses (Source: Al Watan newspaper (Oman)). The value of this news does not lie in a free ticket, but in what lies behind it: a stranded citizen who found his state looking for him, not the other way round.
For the word "stranded" is a cold administrative word hiding behind it a complete human being: a father whose papers expired while he does not own the price of a ticket nor the ability to pay a fine; a mother waiting with her children between the fear of violation and anxiety about tomorrow; and a young man whom the war drove from his home and his work, only to find himself suspended in a foreign country. These people do not need seasonal sympathy nor cameras taking their pictures; they need a clear right and a clear procedure: to know where to register, when they will depart, and whom to ask if the road falters. Dignity begins when a person stops being a file lost between offices.
Here appears the true meaning of the state we call for: institutions that serve the citizen wherever he is, not façades for occasions. An embassy abroad is not a celebration hall; it is a house of service for its country's sons, and its value is measured by what it does for its weakest citizens, not by the pictures it publishes. That is why this announcement is a practical test of administration as much as it is good news: its success depends on transparent registration without intermediaries, announced criteria known to all, clear priority for the sick, the elderly, women and children, and fixed dates that do not change in the dark. Transparency alone protects the initiative from the brokers of fear and from everyone who has grown used to trading in people's need and turning their plight into a market.
Yet the two words "voluntary return" must always stay together: return, and voluntary. Whoever chooses to go back to his homeland exercises an inherent right, and whoever chooses to regularize his status and stay where he works and lives exercises a right no less inherent; there is no coercion in belonging, and no bidding over anyone's patriotism by his departure airport or his residence. In return, the state that respects the choice of return is obliged to receive the returnee at home as befits him: housing that shelters him, a clinic that treats him, a school that receives his children, and a job opportunity that restores his standing — otherwise the stranded person merely moves from waiting in a foreign airport to another waiting in his homeland, which is the harsher of the two waitings.
In this scene there is a broader message to all Sudanese of the diaspora, from Muscat to Cairo, Riyadh and London: you are not a seasonal audience summoned in crises and forgotten afterwards; you are part of the body of this homeland wherever you settle, from its north and south and east and west and centre, with your diversity, which is its wealth, not its burden. Sudan's unity is not preserved by slogans alone, but by equal service reaching every citizen, and by institutions that do not ask the citizen about his region or his tribe before asking him what he needs.
Let the Muscat flights be the beginning of a standard, not a passing incident: embassies that count their citizens before they are lost, announce their services before they are asked for them, and are held accountable for what they promised. A homeland is not an address on a passport; a homeland is that you find your country's hand extended to you when you are stranded in the middle of the road — and still extended until you arrive.
— Salma Al-Tijani
