Sudanese townspeople trickle back to raided town
By Nima Elbagir
KURMA, Sudan, April 17 (Reuters) – Shaken by an Arab militia raid but determined to hold on to their ancestral land, some of the people of Kurma are coming out of their mountain redoubts by day to rebuild their small town in western Sudan.
Before dusk falls they head back to the hills, where 4,000 have been sleeping rough since armed Arab horsemen swept into the town on March 16 in an attempt to drive away non-Arab farmers and seize the land for grazing, residents said.
Abandoned by the Sudanese government some three months ago, dozens of the local Tunjur people trickled back into Kurma on Saturday to greet a U.N. needs assessment delegation with the best produce they had to offer — onions and tomatoes.
Some of them had already started to rebuild their lean-to stalls in the market place, encouraged by this month’s news that the Sudanese government and two rebel movements in the vast Darfur region have reached a ceasefire.
The new market is rising amidst the debris from the raid — broken glass, charred, abandoned buildings and crumpled corrugated iron roofing sheets.
“Most of the townspeople are hiding in the mountains, coming into the town by day to tally the damage to their belongings and going back at night to the mountains where they feel secure,” said Babakir Yahya Adam, a local nurse.
ATTACHED TO LAND
Locals still fear the return of the Arab militiamen, known as janjaweed, who rights groups and others in the region say have Khartoum government support. The government says they are outlaws beyond its control.
But attachment to the land has outweighed fear, said Abdel Rahman Haroun, a 48-year-old resident of the town, 75 km (50 miles) west of North Darfur state capital al-Fashir.
“The janjaweed said to us: ‘We don’t want you here. This is now Arab land. We will graze our camels here’,” he said.
“But we will not leave. This is our land. Why should we go to al-Fashir when there is nothing there for us.”
The long conflict, aggravated last year when the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement took up arms against the government, has displaced hundreds of thousands of people into the larger towns. More than 100,000 have fled to neighbouring Chad as refugees.
The encroachments of the janjaweed are part of a long struggle between herdsmen and farmers for the meagre resources of the arid region, where African villagers scratch out a living in the scrub land and depend on wells for their water.
The delegation from the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was the first contact the local people have had with authority since Sudanese civil servants and police left in February.
“Right now there is no one here,” said Abdullah Ahmad Adam said. “No commissioner, no police force, no nothing. We counted and buried our own dead. We wrote up the reports of the dead and the missing by ourselves.”
Osman Ibrahim Adam, 38, local representative of the Sudanese Red Crescent Society, said: “We waited and hoped that someone would come… They think this way they can push us into Chad but we have stayed.”
Yaaqoub Adam Ahmad, the only tribal elder who stayed on in Kurma, said: “Maybe here there will be death for us, and if we go to al-Fashir on the road maybe there will be death for us there, but at least here we have dignity.”
The townspeople fell silent at the sound of a plane overhead, a reminder of the March 16 raid, when government planes landed nearby to unload ammunition and take away some of the sheep looted from the area, townspeople said. Forty-seven people were killed in the attack, they added.
“Every day we wonder if they are coming back,” said Ahmad.