Darfur: A second wave of genocide has begun
The story of a former Janjaweed fighter who fled to the UK shows beyond doubt that a second wave of genocide has begun.
By Eric Reeves, The Guardian (UK)
October 18, 2006 — Although there are perverse pockets of skepticism about whether atrocities in Darfur amount to genocide, the evidence provided by human rights organisations and UN assessments over the past three and a half years incinerates all but the most obdurate or politically motivated doubt. The narrative of ethnically-targeted human destruction has become numbingly, terrifyingly familiar.
As part of a ghastly counter-insurgency war, the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party in Khartoum, which dominates a merely notional “Government of National Unity,” has systematically attacked non-Arab or African villages throughout Darfur, engaging in the deliberately comprehensive destruction of livelihoods of those assaulted. Food- and seed-stocks have been burned; agricultural implements and water vessels destroyed; water wells poisoned with human and animal corpses; mature fruit trees cut down; all buildings burned.
Khartoum’s regular military forces did not comprise sufficient manpower for the scale of genocidal destruction contemplated, so the Janjawid were recruited – a very large, brutal, and extremely well-armed Arab militia force. Many of the Janjawid leaders had extensive previous experience as militia raiders; some had served in Muamar Ghaddafi’s notorious “Islamic Legion”. But the Janjawid also needed more manpower than was readily available, given the immense number of African villages that would be targeted (thousands have now been destroyed, according to my many contacts in the Darfuri diaspora – between 80 and 90% of all villages of the Fur, Massalit, Zaghawa, Birgid, and others).
This is where young men like “Dily” come in. Dily, in his early twenties, is a former Janjaweed fighter who became overwhelmed by the atrocities he was recruited to commit, and fled Darfur on a journey that would take him finally to the UK. Both the Times and the BBC (October 17, 2006) have reported on Dily (“Ali” in the BBC account), and have made every effort to determine the authenticity of his claims about his background. Darfuris and others (including James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust) assert with great confidence he is who he claims to be. The chances of a hoax are vanishingly small.
In one sense, Dily tells us nothing new. But there has been no such previous view offered from within inside the Janjaweed – no first-person narrative by a génocidaire in the ranks. And Dily’s account is harrowing. After rudimentary training, he and other young Arab men recruited by local tribal leaders were given their orders, which derived ultimately from Khartoum:
“Dily and his battalion – led by a former bandit – spent the next three years on the move, destroying one village after another. ‘The Government said attack all villages. The local commanders decided which,’ he said.”
“The battalion would send scouts to check whether there were armed fighters in the targeted village. ‘If there were no fighters we just attacked straight away. If there were we had to be more cautious.’ Sometimes they used satellite telephones to request airstrikes by the Sudanese military helicopters before attacking. ‘We would see smoke and fire and then we would go in.'”
“The attacks usually started early and lasted most of the day. The commanders said the villages had to be destroyed, and they did not spare women or children. ‘Mostly they said “Kill the blacks. Kill the blacks,”‘ Dily said. ‘The majority of (the victims) were civilians, most of them women.'”
The villages targeted were all “black” or African villages. A variety of racially charged epithets, hurled by attackers, have been recorded by human rights investigators interviewing survivors of assaults such as those recounted by Dily: “zurga”, “Nuba” (after the region in southern Kordofan – a broad term fobid” (meaning “slave”, with many connotations of the hateful word “nigger”).
Dily reports that “for three years he and his fellow Janjawid charged the farming villages of Darfur on their camels and horses, raking the huts with gunfire and shouting: ‘Kill the slaves! Kill the slaves!'” Sedentary farming is the most distinguishing feature of the African tribal populations in Darfur.
Following such attacks, few escaped: Dily recalls that if there were survivors after an attack on a village, “they would be left there … They couldn’t get help. Sometimes they made it to camps but mostly they died of thirst or starvation.”
Dily’s account is of enormous importance at present, since all evidence suggests a massive re-grouping and heavy re-arming of Janjawid forces is currently underway, especially in North Darfur, where Khartoum’s August ground and air offensive has met fierce rebel resistance and sustained heavy losses of men and equipment. The regime’s most likely response will be to turn loose the Janjawid, this vicious instrument of ethnic destruction, upon all remaining African villages, and quite conceivably to engage in full-scale assaults on camps for the internally displaced, wretched homes for more than 2 million human beings driven from their homes and lands – virtually all are African.
For there is no meaningful security in Darfur, including in these squalid camps to which humanitarian access is rapidly diminishing. A diffident international community has refused to move toward deploying the large-scale UN peace support operation outlined in UN Security Council Resolution 1706, cowering before Khartoum’s defiant and narrowly self-serving assertion of “national sovereignty”.
The African Union force on the ground is crumbling. And there are many more Dily’s. Darfur’s second major phase of genocidal destruction is well begun.
* Eric Reeves is a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts; he has published extensively on Sudan for a number of years. he can be reached at [email protected], website : www.sudanreeves.org.