Uprooted Sudanese balk at invitation to return home
May 8, 2004.
By MARC LACEY, The New York Times
GENEINA, Sudan, May 6, 2004 — The governor of this rugged stretch of earth, where the climate and the outlaws are equally harsh, declared Thursday that Darfur was safe again. Speaking in his office in the regional capital of West Darfur, the governor, Sulieman Abdallah Adam, said it was time for the million or so people amassed in makeshift camps across western Sudan, including 23,000 on the edge of this town, to head back to their villages again.
The only problem with his decree is that the displaced villagers know better. They have the wounds to prove that Darfur remains deadly, no matter what the government says. Some of their wounds are fresh, so fresh that they plan to flout the governor’s order.
“There is no way I’m going back,” Yousif Baraka Dendi said from the Ardamata camp, one of dozens across Darfur. “In one hour I’d be killed. All of us would. You wouldn’t see anybody alive.”
Crowded around him were hundreds of other black Africans chased off their land in recent months by Arab militias working, at times, in tandem with government troops. The camp dwellers cried out in agreement with Mr. Dendi. If the government brings in trucks to take them back home, they said, they will run, again.
One young woman described how militiamen, called janjaweed, had surrounded her and raped her as she left the camp in search of firewood. She said her entire body still ached from the attack, which she said occurred earlier this week. She said she was not moving.
Another woman held up a bleeding hand, which she had used to fend off a militiaman’s blows. She was attacked earlier the same morning, she said, and, no, she is not going home either.
Other women came forward with tales of horror. One pointed to a scar on her neck. Another showed a gash under her eye.
In Darfur, as in most of Africa, the men farm and do construction while the women spend their days fetching water and firewood and cooking. Collecting firewood is by far the most dangerous task, and all of the attacks the women described had happened while they were out gathering.
They rise before dawn and slip out in the darkness, hoping to get back before the sun comes up. Because wood supplies near the camp have been exhausted, they are forced farther and farther afield, making them ever more vulnerable.
The armed men are visible from the camp, riding horses or camels and balancing guns across their knees. It is impossible to determine how many janjaweed there are in Darfur. Many now wear army uniforms, enlisted by the government to help defeat two rebel movements that began operations last year. Others look like the outlaws that they are. But regardless of their dress, the janjaweed now stalk Darfur’s landscape as though it is theirs.
Inside a straw hut at the Ardamata camp, a woman too weak to rise from her straw bed held up a bruised hand. She said the militiamen had broken the rake she had been using to gather up straw earlier this week. They beat her with one end of the handle and then ripped her clothing away and raped her.
“They told me not to come out of the camp,” she said. “They said, ‘This is not your land.’ ”
Sitting at the end of a long conference table in his office a few miles away, the governor, Mr. Adam, insisted that the government had restored order in the region. He said most of the internally displaced people of West Darfur were eager to return home. Those still fearful are misinformed, he said.
Despite its resolve, the government is having little success persuading people to go back to their old lives. Trucks were supposed to start picking up camp dwellers at the beginning of this week, but that has been delayed. There was another false start at midweek. One local official, speaking out of earshot of his colleagues, acknowledged that there was too much opposition and fear from camp dwellers.
But opposition has not always stopped the government in other parts of the country from moving people.
In Khartoum, the national capital, the police last month forcibly expelled some Darfur residents who had sought refuge in a school, firing tear gas to quell the resulting disturbance.
In Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, government soldiers moved through a camp called Intifada in January and ordered everybody to move to another settlement further away. Aid workers said the advancing soldiers had threatened to burn the straw huts of those who did not leave. Camp dwellers, who had already seen their villages burn, quickly dispersed.
The government has also tried to lure home refugees who fled to the neighboring country of Chad, with equally little success. During one visit to a camp in the desert of eastern Chad, the refugees began stoning Sudanese officials who spoke about the peaceful conditions back home, aid workers said.
In other instances, camp dwellers have been told that they will receive relief assistance once they arrive in their villages. But aid organizations say they were never included in such plans.
Mr. Adam said the changing seasons were adding new urgency to the refugees’ return. May is typically the month that farmers prepare their fields before the rainy season arrives in June. Unless they go home now, the governor said, an entire planting season will be lost.
Many of the camps in Darfur are already taking on a more permanent feel. Residents are putting up mud huts with straw roofs, simplified versions of their dwellings that were destroyed. Aid organizations are digging wells, putting up latrines and erecting tented health clinics to treat the steady stream of ill and injured.
But there is nothing comfortable about these settlements. They sit atop hard desert terrain, and the winds whip up storms of sand. When the rains begin the suffering will grow even more. The camp dwellers say they are used to growing what they eat, not lining up for rations.
“We’re poor now,” said Zahra Adam Ali, 25, who had tears in her eyes as she lamented her fate. “It’s taken our whole lives to get our cows. We had a house and we had enough to eat. The men on the horses took everything.”