Sudan’s govt bombs town after uprising against Arabs

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Knight Ridder Newspapers

TAWILLA, Sudan, NOv 28, 2004 (KRT) — Under a periwinkle blue sky, Hawa Thom glared Sunday at evidence that shattered Sudan’s claim that it doesn’t bomb its own civilians in the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

A young Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) rebel marches through the mountain village of Deribat in South Darfur state in western Sudan November 16, 2004. (Reuters).

In a flame-swept compound covered with blackened straw, a 5-foot-wide crater, mangled shrapnel the size of a plate, smashed pottery and roasted bed frames were the residue of a government bombing attack.

Thom’s circular mud-brick hut, where she lived with her nine children, was a charred carcass, its thatched roof burned away, just like three others nearby.

“That’s fate,” mumbled the thin, weathered Thom, 40, in a dazed, hopeless voice.

The government bombed this strategic town last Monday in response to a rebel attack earlier that morning. Tens of thousands, including more than 50 humanitarian aid workers, fled, bringing tales of an aerial attack and gunfights that fractured a cease-fire less than 2 weeks old.

The bombing was the latest incident – sparked by an unprecedented uprising by local black African merchants against pro-government Arab militias called the Janjaweed – that underscores the tensions between Sudan’s Arab-dominated government and its black majority.

The conflict began last year, when black African rebels launched an insurgency saying they faced discrimination. The government recruited the Janjaweed and backed them with Soviet-made bombers and helicopter gun ships. The violence has taken an estimated 70,000 lives and uprooted 1.6 million.

Senior Sudanese officials denied any bombing raid on Tawilla, as they have done numerous times in other areas of Darfur Province, the center of the revolt. They have also restricted journalists from traveling to sites of clashes.

Local authorities repeatedly denied access to journalists wishing to travel to Tawilla, citing security concerns.

On Saturday, journalists from two U.S. news organizations accompanied an African Union investigation team to Tawilla for a two-day visit. They entered a town battered by bombs and bullets and deeply scarred by months under siege.

Homes were abandoned. The market, usually buzzing with hawkers, was quiet expect for a few traders and men coming to see if it was safe for their families to return. Streets were empty and eerily silent. Women and children were scarce.

“Tawilla was full of people in the past,” said Mariam Adam, 35. “Most have scattered into the hills. I only came back to see if any food was left in my house. But it’s been taken. Now I’m headed back to my hiding place.

“Nobody spends the night in Tawilla,” she added.

Nestled along the main highway that supplies government troops in western Sudan, near the heartland of the Janjaweed, Tawilla has felt the full brunt of the conflict. In February and March, Janjaweed militias attacked – burning, looting, and raping hundreds of women.

Since then, the town has been a hotbed of tension. The Janjaweed would routinely descend from nearby villages to loot at night, while police sent to protect Tawilla would look the other way, or even loot themselves, according to townspeople.

Then a sense of normalcy began to reappear. Arabs from nearby villages would come to trade on market days, every Saturday and Tuesday, and would pay for goods.

That changed two weeks ago. On Saturday, Nov. 13, a gang of Janjaweed looted some merchants at gunpoint in the market, said townspeople.

The following Tuesday, a group of Arabs, including women, came for cloth at the market but refused to pay, according to witnesses. That’s when the merchants – and scores more in the market – turned on the Arabs. They picked up stones and clubs and attacked the group, leaving three men and a woman dead, said witnesses.

It’s not clear why the Arabs refused to pay. Nor is it clear if they were Janjaweed, or whether the rebels took part in the killings.

But for the people of Tawilla the murders felt justified – the first time they had ever taken revenge on the Janjaweed.

“All of us participated,” said Ibrahim Ahmed, 32, looking around at a group of men in a coffee stall. “I was happy.

“What the Janjaweed did to the people of Tawilla was more painful than what we did to them.”

The Janjaweed militias came back that night, looting and shooting, injuring an old woman and a little boy, continuing the cycle of revenge, said townspeople.

Last Monday, it was the rebels’ turn. Shortly after the Muslim dawn prayers, gunfire erupted. Like thousands of others, Thom fled her house with her children, taking only a blanket and an empty sack for her children to lie on. She left behind her most valuable possessions – a bed, some tobacco, pots and clothes.

She took refuge in a field as the gunfights flared throughout the morning.

In the mid-afternoon, Thom and other witnesses said, they saw a white plane circle in the sky, then drop its load.

“It was a terrible noise,” recalled Thom. “Then there was red dust. One of the houses was burning.” Fortunately, because so many people had already fled, there were no casualties from the bombing.

About half mile east of Tawilla, a Knight Ridder reporter and photographer found four more craters, smaller than the one at Thom’s compound. There were small pieces of shrapnel in three of the craters. Near one crater, the wall of a dike was chipped away, as if struck by a heavy object.

Fati Elrahman, a Sudanese government liaison to the African Union, who also visited Thom’s compound, declined comment on the bombing.

Thom gained the courage to leave her hiding place in the dry riverbed called a wadi and return Friday to her bombed house. She was hoping to find some of her valuables. But there was nothing, she said.

“Everything was burned,” she lamented. “It’s fate. So I went back to the wadi.”

By Tuesday evening, the government had retaken control of Tawilla. Sunday, heavily armed soldiers, perched atop a hill, glare from behind sand bunkers, staring at an empty, bombed town.