Darfur rebels threaten to topple Sudan’s Bashir
By Anthony Loyd
March 19, 2009 (LONDON) — Northern Darfur Death came from above and in unlikely form: a white Antonov cargo plane circling slowly at high altitude. Huddled beneath in the scattered shadows of desiccated trees in the desert, rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) abandoned their siesta and looked skywards.
“The usual life, night and day,” one remarked fatalistically as the first payload of bombs, jettisoned from the Antonov’s cargo ramp, detonated in a wadi several hundred metres away.
The plane was joined by a second aircraft in a series of bombing runs that lasted until dusk. The explosions were clumsy and indiscriminate, but it was enough for the rebels to know that their position had been spotted and they needed to move on. At nightfall they gathered their vehicles, mud-painted four-wheel-drive pick-ups, into a column and snaked away into the darkness.
Known as “night locusts” by their government enemies, the rebels call their conflict the “Land Cruiser war” or “Toyota war” owing to their preferred vehicle of choice for travel and battle. The distances are huge. “It’s not uncommon to go, fight and come back having covered 800 kilometres in 24 hours,” said General Abu Bakr, 55, one of the JEM’s leading commanders, who has spent most of the past six years in the Darfur deserts.
The style of desert warfare is almost naval in its tactics. “You get in as close as you can as fast as you can and keep fighting whatever happens to your vehicle,” one fighter noted, patting the heavy machinegun mounted on a Toyota platform.
He pointed to the vehicle’s crumpled bumper. “We got that from ramming enemy vehicles during fighting over the last month,” he added.
The JEM shot to prominence last year with a daring assault on Omdurman, a suburb of Khartoum, when more than 300 of their vehicles travelled nearly a thousand kilometres to attack the capital.
Though the assault failed it attracted the group considerable support among Darfuri refugees despairing at the chance of any negotiated settlement to end the war.
Regarded by many foreign diplomats as the only feasible threat to Sudan’s military in Darfur, last month they were the only rebel group invited to peace talks with the Sudanese Government in Qatar, though they have threatened not to return to the negotiating table if Qatar allows Sudan’s President al-Bashir to attend an Arab League summit planned there this month.
JEM’s current fortunes are a far cry from those experienced by veterans who joined the movement in 2003. “Then we had just six vehicles,” recalled General Abu Bakr.
“Sudan’s relationship with Chad was much better and we were squeezed between both sides.”
Now the rebels, backed by Chad, claim to have more than 800 land cruisers and more than 7,000 fighters operating in the desert in Darfur and threaten to bring down President al-Bashir’s regime unless the international community resolve the current political and humanitarian crisis.
“If the international community fail to act … we will go to Khartoum and topple the regime ourselves – we are quite capable of that,” said Ahmed Hussein, spokesman for the organisation and a member of JEM’s Executive Leadership Office.
At the weekend the JEM contacted American and Norwegian officials to propose a three-point plan to the United Nations Security Council to defuse the crisis. These included the establishment of a no-fly zone over Darfur, the opening of aid routes for NGOs into the province through neighbouring countries and an oil-for-food programme diverting a proportion of Sudan’s oil revenue to medical, humanitarian and food aid to Darfur.
The landscape in which the rebels fight is a vast unforgiving expanse of sun-blasted sand, thorn and denuded shrubs where the heat allows few errors of judgment.
With no night vision or navigation equipment the fighters navigate instead by the stars and sun. Rations are often irregular.
The fate of the wounded, who must survive huge journeys if they are to find treatment in Chad after action in Darfur, is unenviable. In the past many have found their wounds were treated with chewed acacia.
The JEM’s leadership boasts an impressive array of doctors and lawyers and a sophisticated agenda that extends to redistributing power among Sudan’s oppressed and marginalised peoples.
Despite all their dominance in the international arena, their rise to power has brought problems. “When we started, five camels were enough to feed everyone for a month,” Abu Bakr remembered. “Now we need 70 or 80. We are like a mobile state.”
This article was published inThe Times