War in Western Sudan Overshadows Peace in the South

By SOMINI SENGUPTA, The New York Times

TINÉ, Sudan, Jan. 17 – As Africa’s longest-running civil war comes to a close in one corner of this vast country, a terrifying new theater, fueled by old ethnic divides and old-fashioned greed, opens here in another.

Today, this once bustling border town is empty, save for a smattering of guerrillas who peek out of the mud houses with satellite phones and Kalashnikovs in hand.

Peasants flee their homes, hiding in caves, crossing dry riverbeds under cover of night, seeking sanctuary across the border in Chad. According to estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 95,000 refugees have poured across the 375-mile-long border in recent months to erect their cities of straw and desert twigs.
As many as 30,000 crossed in December alone from the sprawling western Sudanese region known as Darfur, and they are still coming.

The United Nations estimates that an additional 600,000 displaced people are in Darfur. Their conditions are impossible to determine; the Sudanese government has denied access to aid agencies on security grounds.

The testimonies of the Darfur refugees, gathered from their makeshift camps in the barren savannahs of eastern Chad, reveal a chilling pattern to Sudan’s latest conflict, this one pitting the country’s Arab-dominated government against Darfur’s black African insurgents.

Their stories are likely to serve as a grim reminder to the Bush administration, for whom peace in Sudan has emerged as a major foreign policy priority, that the job of quelling conflict in Africa’s largest country may be far from finished.

A young man said he was tending his cattle one morning early this month when gunmen rode up on horses and camels, corralled his livestock and began shooting. His brother, he said, was killed. The young man, with a bullet wound in his left hip, traveled three days to reach a doctor in Birak, a Chadian border town.

A woman recalled looking up from her cucumber patch to see an army on horseback. The entire village – all women now, because the men fled months ago, fearing just such an attack – ran to the hills. When night came, with babies on their backs, they crossed into Chad.

Another newcomer described an attack on refugees camped out in a dry riverbed just inside Chad. Early on a Sunday morning, he recounted, gunmen descended, herded away the cattle the refugees had brought with them and began firing. The man, Tamur Bura Idriss, 31, said he lost his uncle and grandfather. He heard the gunmen say, “You blacks, we’re going to exterminate you.” He fled deeper into Chad that night.

The United Nations refugee agency has begun moving the Sudanese to safer ground, at least 30 miles from the border. The agency has appealed for $16 million for the project; the World Food Program has called for $11 million for emergency relief.

The refugees described their attackers as Arab militias armed with grenades and machine guns, sometimes accompanied by soldiers in Sudanese military uniforms. They said their belongings were stolen, the men were killed or kidnapped and the women were raped. There are reports of villages being burned and bombed by Sudanese military planes.

It is impossible to travel in Darfur to verify these claims.

The black African rebels, who began the insurgency last February, accuse the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum of giving carte blanche to the militias to push the people from their land, a charge the government denies. Land has long been an axis of conflict between the black Africans and the Arabs, both herders in need of pastures.

The growing war between the government in Khartoum and the rebels in Darfur is particularly worrisome because it comes as Sudan’s other war, which has lasted nearly 20 years and killed an estimated 1.5 million people, is beginning to show signs of a resolution.

Peace talks between the Islamist government in the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, from the largely Christian and animist south, have steadily inched forward. Though unresolved issues remain, a final accord, which is to include a referendum on self-rule for the south, could come within weeks. That is likely to be followed by a substantial United Nations peacekeeping force for Sudan.

The Bush administration has lately turned its attention to the new war in Darfur, calling on both sides to negotiate and dispatching a team of American officials this month to assess the refugees’ situation on the border. Among their goals, they said, was to look into the possibility of sending aid to rebel-held areas in Darfur even if it meant going against Khartoum’s wishes.

“Just as this peace process is coming to fruition, you have this burgeoning crisis in Darfur,” said Roger P. Winter, an assistant administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, who was part of the delegation.

“It calls into question the sincerity of the government. They can’t be good guys in the south and do what they’re doing in Darfur.”

Rebel groups in Darfur have sought to leverage the north-south peace talks for their own cause, arguing that they, too, should be offered a slice of a power-sharing deal. Their chief complaint is that the government, dominated by the northern Arab elite, has ignored their needs.

“No peace will come in Sudan if we leave the marginalized areas in Sudan and make peace in the south,” Abubakar Hamid Nour, general coordinator of the Justice and Equality Movement, one of two Darfur rebel groups, declared in an interview at his headquarters, a pitch-dark mud-brick house here in Tiné (pronounced TEE-nay). “I want the marginalized states to be at the table, sharing, dividing, deciding.”

He called the next day to report that Tiné had been bombed.

Sudan’s interior minister said in an interview with Reuters that Khartoum was open to negotiations with the rebels. But government officials have also made it clear that the peace deal for the south, being drawn up in Naivasha, Kenya, cannot be applied to the west. Self-rule, in other words, is out of the question.

“What goes on in Darfur does not necessarily have anything to do with what’s going on here in Naivasha,” a Sudanese vice president, Osman Ali Taha, told reporters this month. “The government is determined to come up with a resolution to the situation in Darfur.”

Until then, the people of Darfur keep pouring across the border, huddling inside the rows upon rows of straw and twig huts as the temperatures drop to near freezing at night.

Life remains perilous. The camps have been raided by the militias. Sudanese Antonov airplanes fly over Chadian territory. In late December, a bomb landed in Besa, a Chadian village, more than nine miles from the border. Not far away, a helicopter shot down in battle landed in Chad. Chadian soldiers said they saw Sudanese soldiers guarding it.

Villagers in the area reported that land mines had been laid around the camp’s perimeter, a claim yet to be confirmed by a United Nations team working to remove mines in the region.

It is unlikely that the refugee crisis will end anytime soon. To the contrary, some political analysts fear that a peace deal for the south will only free Khartoum to redirect its military might against the rebellion in Darfur. The prospect of peace in one war-weary corner of the country, in other words, could potentially deepen an already ugly conflict between Arabs and Africans here.

“Darfur is likely to plunge further into the horror of open ethnic warfare,” warned John Prendergast, a special adviser with the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization, “if national and international action fail to arrest the current trend.”