Sudan between war and peace
By ANDREW ENGLAND, Associated Press Writer
TINE, Chad, Mar 12, 2004 (AP) — For three days Muburak Sheik lay under a tree, his left foot mangled by shrapnel, victim of a new war that has broken out in Sudan just as the old one is grinding to a halt.
Bombed out of his village, the 23-year-old finally made it to neighboring Chad. He is one of more than 600,000 people made homeless in fighting that has cast a shadow over the U.S.-backed effort to pacify Africa’s biggest country.
Sudan’s 21-year civil war has long been seen as a fight between its Muslim north and its animist and Christian south. But the fighting that is wreaking havoc in the Iraq-sized Darfur region of western Sudan shows how much more fractured the country is.
As in the old conflict, the new one stems from a revolt by insurgents against poverty and neglect by the central government in faraway Khartoum, and a sense that as the peace bandwagon moves forward, they have to move fast to win a greater share of wealth and power for Darfur.
The difference is that in the past the tribes in the impoverished northern desert and southern savanna of Darfur fought for their Islamic government and many joined the army.
Now it’s Muslims fighting Muslims.
Refugees say the government’s onslaught is ferocious. The government blames the rebels for the suffering and chaos. Its tactics could be a way of signaling that the concessions it has made to the south don’t mean it will offer the same to other restive areas of the country.
“Darfur has really shaken up this regime,” said Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service. “Where do they stop this train? If you give in to the political demands of the Darfur rebels, why not to the Beja (in eastern Sudan), why not to the Nuba (in central Sudan) and a bunch of the other marginalized areas.”
Predominantly Muslim, Sudan bridges the African and Arab worlds, its borders drawn up during Europe’s 19th-century scramble for colonies.
Home to 30 million people, it has oil, gold and vast arable land. But little wealth finds its way beyond the capital.
The government of President Omar el-Bashir, who seized power in 1989, is dominated by Arabs from the north who rule with an iron fist.
Details about events inside Darfur, home to some 7 million people, are sketchy because the government prevents access.
But among the more than 110,000 refugees in the Chad border town of Tine and elsewhere, harrowing tales circulate of attacks by the Sudanese army and government-backed militia drawn from nomadic Arab tribes that have moved into the region.
As many recount, typically they would first hear Antonov bombers droning over their villages, sending men, women and children fleeing in panic. The next thing they would hear would be army trucks, the pounding of hooves and the crack of gunfire as government troops and militiamen on horseback would charge in.
Sheik said his village of Toumtoubaye was destroyed and ransacked about two months ago. His family fled to Chad, a few miles away, but he couldn’t follow on his wounded legs. Alone and frightened, he lay down and waited to bleed to death.
Three days later his relatives came back and took him to Tine on horseback. Here, doctors amputated what remained of his left foot.
Now he sits in the shade at a hospital in Tine cursing his government. He had wanted to become an art teacher. Now he says he’s considering joining the insurgency.
“At first I had no opinion about the rebels, but now the government comes and burns our houses, kills the people and takes our animals. We don’t have anything,” he said.
The rebel groups – the Sudan Liberation Army, or SLA, and the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM – accuse the government of carrying out a scorched-earth policy to crush the rebellion and wipe out potential supporters.
The government denies it. A month ago el-Bashir said the army had full control of Darfur, but the rebels say their ranks are swelling.
“El-Bashir and his gang are always lying,” said Abu Bakar Hamed Nour, a senior JEM official. “We are occupying most of the rural areas.” Mahdi Ibrahim Mohammed, a senior member of the ruling National Congress party, says it’s the rebels who are killing and looting.
“They brought about such a level of confrontation … they are really bandits, they have no real purpose,” he said by telephone from Khartoum. “The government does not attack villages.”
The rebels say they are carrying out hit-and-run raids on government convoys and military camps near two of the region’s main cities, el-Fasher and Nyala, 120 miles apart.
The JEM’s Nour, a bespectacled 50-year-old agricultural engineer, said his group has between 8,000 and 11,000 fighters, the SLA another 16,000. The two forces are fighting side by side, using weapons captured from government forces, he said, sitting in a mud brick house dimly lit by kerosene lamps.
The insurgents have five or six mobile camps, hide in dry river beds and valleys and sneak up on government positions at night, attacking at dawn with assault rifles, heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, Nour said.
One of their big advantages is having the latest tool of African rebels, in Sudan and elsewhere – Thuraya satellite telephones.