FEATURE-Ghost town exposes Sudan’s hidden war
By Matthew Green
TINE, Sudan/Chad border, Feb 9 (Reuters) – The drone of the bomber’s engines grew louder, sending Sudanese rebels hurrying between the mud houses below.
“Don’t run — hide!” ordered one of the guerrillas, and his comrades crouched behind boulders in a seemingly futile attempt to escape from the aircraft circling overhead.
A low whistling sound heralded the payload of bombs which smashed into an abandoned hut across the street. A pall of black smoke billowed into the sky and a feeling of relief coursed through onlookers spared from the blast.
The raid on the Sudanese side of the Chad-Sudan border town of Tine on January 26 was a rare glimpse into the kind of attacks that aid workers say have forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee villages across western Sudan in recent months.
Women and children trekking across the frontier into Chad bring tales of similar bombings by Sudanese government planes and attacks by horse-riding “Janjaweed” militia, who they say are sent by the government to burn their villages.
Few outsiders reach the areas to check the accounts, but a visit to Tine yields evidence that Sudan’s government has launched an offensive against rebels in the west of the country in which civilians are paying a heavy price.
The government has blamed the refugees on rebels, but witnesses speak only of raids by Sudan’s armed forces.
“We don’t even know why we’re being bombed,” said Ibrahim Daoud, 36, lying with a shrapnel wound in his thigh in a hospital tent on the Chadian side of the border, along with about 20 other Sudanese men, some with legs amputated.
Beyond the human toll, the diplomatic implications of the violence may reach all the way to Washington.
The United States has pressured Sudan to work towards ending a separate, 20-year-old civil war with rebels in the south, hoping to rebuild ties with a country it lists as a “state sponsor of terror” and which once hosted Osama bin Laden.
The International Crisis Group think-tank warns that the attacks in the west could undermine any peace deal for south Sudan and has urged the United States to lean on Khartoum to stop its raids and start negotiations.
Rebels said in early February they would attend talks with the government in Geneva to allow aid distribution in Sudan’s western Darfur region, although it is unclear whether the negotiations will lead to progress towards a durable ceasefire.
ABANDONED
On the border at Tine, which lies about 1,000 km (620 miles) east of Chad’s capital N’Djamena, talk of peace feels a long way from the reality of a town overshadowed by war.
Fear of government bombs has turned the Sudanese side into a ghost town. In the Chadian half, donkeys pick their way between ramshackle buildings and men wander past in white robes in scenes that have changed little since antiquity.
Despite its timeless feel, Tine’s Chadian section has suffered one of its biggest shocks in years with the arrival of thousands of refugees, some of the 100,000 Sudanese who began pouring across a 600-km (370 miles) stretch of the border in March.
Signs of the new arrivals are everywhere. Outside town, a woman’s crimson shawl flutters in the branches of a tree — like a flag marking the spot where her family had just arrived to bed down on the sand with little food or water.
“The army comes, then the Janjaweed, then the bombing,” said a man named Abdallah. “They can destroy any village.”
Residents say the war has hit commerce in a town serving traders driving camels between Sudan, Chad and Libya, although there did seem to have been an increase in demand for one thing — car spare parts sought by Sudanese rebels.
MISTRUST
They kept a low profile, but in late January it was easy to find guerrillas or their sympathisers in Tine, including a 36-year-old named Musa who said he had given up life as an immigrant delivering pizzas in Washington to back the cause.
The government has since said it has captured the Sudanese side of the town, although rebels are active elsewhere.
Insurgents in the west say they are fighting years of discrimination by the government against black African farming communities in favour of nomadic Arabs in the barren region, dismissing Khartoum’s denials that it treats the area unfairly.
The rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) accuses the government of intensifying its efforts to crush the rebels since December to avoid having to make concessions like those granted to southerners at peace talks in Kenya.
JEM says it would welcome peace negotiations brokered by countries like the United States — but mistrust remains high.
“They’re killing, bombing and looting,” said JEM general coordinator Abu Bakr Hamid al-Nur, speaking in a dried out river bed marking the frontier. “What they’re saying is different from what they’re doing…We don’t trust them.”