...[In November 2004] Hassan Ahmed Omar...was taken to an office in Khartoum where he says a six-month saga of imprisonment, interrogation and occasional beatings began. Mr Omar's transgression was to be associated with a campaign against Khartoum's $2bn...hydro-electric dam project...Sudanese officials say building the dam is crucial to development...[and] will also create a 170km-long reservoir that will help irrigate desert terrain...Unease about the dam is also fuelled by Khartoum's poor human rights record and its failure in the past to distribute the benefits of development equitably. This is compounded by the involvement in the dam of a German company [Lahmeyer] blacklisted by the World Bank for alleged corruption on another African project - and of companies from China, which...has played an important role in supporting the government during the past decade while other nations have attempted to bring Khartoum to book over atrocities in Darfur and southern Sudan...Rather than being able to settle on the shores of the reservoir and gaining access to irrigated land, the government decided those living in the area should be resettled to villages it is building in the desert, in some cases more than 40km from the Nile... Last August, just under half the Amri [a local tribe] were relocated - they claim forcibly - when dam authorities flooded their area, affecting scores of homes...Just three months earlier, hundreds of Amri...ended up in confrontation with security forces, who fired on the crowd and killed three people.