‘You have to go to save your life’
By Elisa Cramer,The Palm Beach Post
June 17, 2005 — Mohamed Fator remembers the day he finally told his mother and three sisters he would be leaving – possibly forever – to try to avoid the fate of the estimated 400,000 fellow Sudanese who have died in deliberate, unceasing attacks in the past two years.
A year before he left, he and the rest of his village had been awakened at daybreak by screams. Mr. Fator ran into nearby woods and returned to find his father and many relatives dead, his neighborhood burned to the ground. “There is no home. There is no village. There is nothing there.”
Stripped of the cows and sheep he had helped his father raise, sheltered only by cloth “just to keep you from the sun” in a makeshift camp for refugees, devoid of sufficient food and clean water, he feared death – by murder or disease. “If outside, they can kill you. If in house, they can kill you,” Mr. Fator said of the Janjaweed militias. “Nowhere is safe.”
So, hours before he left that evening on a dangerous stop-and-go trek along unpaved roads, through woods, by occasional car, mostly by foot from Nyala in south Darfur, eventually by train to the Sudanese capital Khartoum, then to a United Nations office in Egypt, he said only this to his mother and sister: “I don’t know how long I’m going to be away.”
He has been away for five years. Now 27, safe in Tampa since May 2004, working at a hospital washing linen, and studying English, he worries about his family. One sister and her husband died last year. “My mother, I don’t know….” He lives with his brother, his brother’s wife and their five children. He is haunted by memories of “the worst thing I’ve seen” – pregnant women in Darfur killed to prevent the birth of a male child.
He knows that he had no choice but to leave his family and knew that there was “no way to take them all.” His mother and sisters, unable to afford the journey financially or physically (women are routinely raped by the militia), encouraged him: “You have to go to save your life.”
Mr. Fator spoke briefly about his experience last week in West Palm Beach, at an event aimed at making area residents aware of the genocide being committed in Africa. In 2005. With the knowledge of the United States, the United Nations, the world.
More than 2 million displaced. Nearly a half-million dead. Gang rapes. Starvation. Castration. Torture. A complicit Sudanese government. The statistics and the images are disheartening, stomach-turning, infuriating and overwhelming. Awareness efforts – demonstrations, letter-writing, fasting, candlelight vigils, proclamations and other action suggested on savedarfur.org – feel pathetically inadequate.
In fact, the real help, the real end to what United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called “near hell on Earth” should come from the United Nations itself. But oil revenue, a lack of concern for feuding Africans, a political and moral willingness to look away – any number of inexcusable excuses from member nations have allowed the killings to continue. The “devils on horseback,” as Janjaweed aptly translates from Arabic, ride on.
Having committed too little too late in Haiti and Rwanda, and with American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, South Korea and Kosovo, perhaps many in Congress feel like Rep. Clay Shaw’s chief Palm Beach County aide, Larry Casey, who said of America’s role in Darfur: “We don’t have to be the front person all the time.” When no one else will, however, those who could, should.
David Rubenstein, coordinator of the Washington, D.C.-based Save Darfur Coalition, put it this way: “Someone said to me today, ‘Well, we’ve done the most already.’ I say, when my neighbor’s house is on fire, I don’t stop putting out the fire because I’ve done more than anyone else.” He adds, “Our neighbor’s house is burning, and the children are locked inside.”
Mr. Fator described the refugee camps with a sigh: “There’s many, many disease there. Some people live on the street. No home. No food. No health.”
One doctor who volunteered in Darfur told a reporter: “How the people exist is beyond my imagination.” How we who could ensure that genocide “never again” happens continue to tolerate it is beyond mine.