Arab nomads also suffer in Darfur war

By Stephanie McCrummen

April 7, 2007 (ZALINGEI, Sudan) — The dispute was of the sort handled a thousand times in this desert region of western Sudan: A young man from the semi-nomadic, cow-herding Arab Hotia tribe had assaulted a young woman from the nomadic, camel-herding Arab Abala tribe, and justice was due.

Following their centuries-old tradition of settling problems, the sheiks and elders from both tribes met and agreed on an amount the Hotia would pay to compensate the Abala, according to Hotia villagers.

“We just had a small issue with them,” the Hotia sheik, Mohameden Adam Abdullah, recalled about the incident two years ago.

What came next, however, offers an example of how four years of conflict have wiped out the delicate ordering of society in Darfur, not only between black African farmers and Arab nomads, but also, on a smaller scale, among Arab tribes often assumed to be the perpetrators of the violence.

Some of the Abala had been armed by the government and transformed into militiamen known as Janjaweed. The Hotia paid half the compensation money, but before they could gather the rest, the Abala attacked in a fury with trucks, camels, rifles and guns, Abdullah said.

“The government helped them . . . they were shooting arms from the government,” he said. “First they attacked, and we defended ourselves. We killed some of them, and they had ID cards from the government.”

The vast majority of the estimated 450,000 people killed and the 2.5 million displaced in Darfur since 2003 have been black African farmers targeted in a brutal government-led campaign to crush a rebellion. But the conflict has also affected nomadic Arabs, who until recently were largely overlooked by the largest relief effort in the world.

The fighting has cut off traditional nomadic migration routes, spawning intertribal conflicts. It has disrupted the once-lucrative camel trade among Sudan, Chad, Libya and Egypt, bringing down the average price of a camel to less than half of what it was a year ago.

In other cases, as with the Hotia and Abala, tribal disputes have escalated as the government has armed one side in its separate campaign against the Darfur rebels.

“It’s way too easy to paint this conflict as one in which African tribes are the victims and Arabs are the aggressors,” a U.N. official in the region said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “There are Arabs who are suffering. Several Arab tribes are not pro-government and not pro-anything. They are just as marginalized.”

Although nomads in Darfur tend to identify themselves as Arabs and farmers tend to consider themselves Africans, the two groups have intermarried for centuries and are often physically indistinguishable.

Still, it is estimated that about half of Darfur’s residents are Arab nomads who crisscross the region following the faint-green sprays of seasonal grasses that appear like miracles in the sometimes rolling, sometimes rocky desert.

Among the dozens of nomadic or semi-nomadic Arab tribes, the Hotia and the Abala have lived with tensions for years, some personal, some political, but most rooted in competition for the desert’s precious grass and water.

A drought in the 1980s exacerbated such competition, and tensions have been intensified in recent years by the Sudanese government’s support of Arab tribes it finds militarily useful because of their knowledge of the land.

In the Zalingei area, the Abala are often accused of mounting attacks against the Fur, black African farmers who have been targeted by the Arab-dominated government because of their assumed support for the Darfur rebels.

The Abala’s attack against the Hotia village appeared to lack that kind of political motive. Instead, it seems to have been one of the many side effects of the proliferation of weapons, as well as a sign of the impunity granted by the government to militiamen as a reward for services rendered.

The Abala struck the Hotia twice in late 2005, first with a militia of about 500 men and then with around 2,000, Abdullah said.

With 115 people killed and most of their cows plundered, the Hotia decided to abandon their village.

About 5,000 people packed up their belongings, loaded them onto donkeys and walked for two days through the sun and sand until they reached Zalingei, a market town in western Darfur. At the time, Zalingei’s population of 30,000 was being engulfed by a tide of people displaced by the fighting, mostly ethnic Fur.

The Fur settled in vast camps of straw huts set close together on a stretch of sand at the edge of town, near the African Union compound and an airstrip buzzing with helicopters.

The Hotia settled separately across the narrow road. Their camp is a collection of loosely spaced straw huts that form a rough facsimile of their lost village.

Until recently, Arab nomads were largely ignored by relief organizations, aid workers said, mostly because the aid groups tended to equate them with the Janjaweed, whose militiamen have been accused of committing atrocities.

That began to change after some Arab nomad leaders wrote letters of complaint to the United Nations and relief groups. Abdullah said that in his camp, basic needs such as food, water, health and education were now being met.

The main problem that remains, he said, is the profound boredom that comes from a life of long walks confined to a small circle, livelihoods wiped out.

“I haven’t a job, I haven’t anything to do,” Abdullah said, sitting in the spiked shade of a straw eave, beneath a sun that in the stillness felt magnified a thousand times. He used to spend days ushering his 30 cows to the water pump, following them out to graze, then herding them home around sundown.

Now, he said, “I just spend some hours in my house with the children, then go to school to check on them, or if someone’s sick, I go to the clinic and visit them.”

A man who had lost an arm in the fighting walked up like a ghost in a tattered trench coat.

“Here, I’m just sitting,” said Adam Abdallah Omar, who is 70. “I haven’t sheep, I haven’t cow, I haven’t anything.”

Omar said that most days, he just thinks away the hours. “Pretty soon, I lose track of time, and I just think that maybe in the future, I will forget my name,” he said.

Mohamed al-Sayed Hussein, head of a group called Al Masar that supports nomad education, said that without a doubt, the Fur and other African farming tribes account for most of the victims in the Darfur conflict. But he is concerned that the nomadic population is not being considered in the equations of peacemaking.

“The nomads protect the government because they have no security,” he said. “And security depends on balance between the tribes.”

In a badly faltering peace agreement signed by the government and one Darfur rebel group last year, Hussein noted, the fate of the nomads was left up to a process of “dialogue” among the tribes, which in his view will hardly solve crucial problems such as grazing rights.

The U.N. official also worried that Arab tribes were being ignored.

“We have to deal with them,” the official said. “It’s almost psychological now. We need to make them feel they’re not lost. By ignoring them, they’re not really going to go away.”

(Washington Post)