Darfur villagers mourn children killed by militia
Nov 5, 2006 (GHEBESH, Sudan) — Arab militia on horses and camels wearing pristine uniforms and carrying brand new guns rode into Mariam Abakr Yehya’s Darfur village early in the morning of Oct. 29, witnesses said.
Her three-year-old son Adam was torn from her embrace and shot dead by the intruders, who killed more than 50 people and looted all they could find in the village.
Overcome with grief as she recalled the incident, Mariam threw herself on the sandy soil, sobbing and beating the ground, her red and yellow robe covered in dust.
She cuddled her tiny baby as a surviving son hid in the gloom of their straw hut.
“Why? why? My heart is broken,” she cried as her family tried to calm her down. “Next time they said they would kill this one,” she said, referring to her baby boy.
The militia attacked three villages and one refugee camp, singling out mostly children, the witnesses said.
Residents put the deal toll at 60. The United Nations at about 50. What is clear is that more than half the victims were children.
“They took the babies and children from their mothers’ arms, beat the women and shot the children,” said Adam Gamer Umar. “They said ‘we’re killing your sons and when you have more we will come and kill them too’,” he added.
Experts estimate that 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million forced to leave their homes in 3-1/2 years of fighting in Darfur after mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003, accusing the central government of neglect.
A peace deal was signed in May by only one of three rebel negotiating factions and violence has escalated since a new alliance of guerrillas who reject the accord resumed hostilities against the Khartoum government.
Under the deal, the government was to have disarmed the militia, known as Janjaweed — a term loosely derived from the Arabic for “devils on horseback” — by Oct. 22.
However, a series of graves around Mariam’s village, each marked only by a few stones and containing several bodies, are testimony that the Janjaweed are still in evidence.
“They were shouting ‘we are the government’, when they attacked,” said 67-year-old Ali Adam Suleiman Ali, nursing his wounds. He said some wore officers’ badges of the Sudanese armed forces. Ten members of his family were killed.
“They were shouting: ‘where are you, slaves?'” said Babiker al-Nur Abdallah, comforting an elderly relative who had buried his head in his hands in grief. “The government and the Arabs want this land for them, they want to occupy it and make us their slaves.”
All the residents were from the non-Arab Misseriya Jabel tribe. Abdallah said this was the fourth time the area had been attacked by the Janjaweed, but the last was more than a year ago and many people had returned home in the meantime.
Three men from different villages said that two or three days before the attack, they saw three helicopters circling overhead. The villages are between 5 and 10 km (3 and 6 miles) from the mountainous Jabel Moun area, a stronghold of the rebel alliance still fighting Sudan’s army.
Many of the wounded were taken to Suleia, the nearest hospital — a three-hour journey on foot. Most inhabitants fled across the border into Chad, which already houses more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees from the Darfur conflict.
The government denies any links to the Janjaweed, blamed for a widespread campaign of rape, murder and pillage in Darfur, which Washington calls genocide. Khartoum rejects the term. The International Criminal Court is investigating alleged war crimes in the region.
(Reuters)