Refugees flee murder and pillage in Sudan’s western Darfur

By Nick Tattersall

KOUNOUNGO, Chad, April 10 (Reuters) – Militiamen on horseback carrying rifles and grenades stormed into Samira Issa’s village in Sudan’s western Darfur region and opened fire, her father said.

She fled with her family into the bush where she gave birth prematurely to a daughter, Amira, but was killed when a plane bombed the villagers huddled round a campfire at night.

“We lit a fire to heat water to clean the baby, but an Antonov plane saw the light,” said Samira’s father Issa Khamis on Friday. Samira was killed by shrapnel.”

Like tens of thousands of refugees from Darfur, Issa, 56, trekked for six days after the attack earlier this year with his wife and three grandchildren across barren savannah into neighbouring Chad.

Aid agencies have set up camps in this remote, impoverished corner of Africa to provide medical care and food in what officials call one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has said outside military action may be needed to stem the violence in Darfur while a senior U.N. official dubbed the fighting “ethnic cleansing” in which some 750,000 people had been driven from their homes.

The U.N. tents pegged into the sand at Kounoungo currently house just under 6,000 men, women and children, though the camp is receiving 150-200 refugees each day.

Some just fall upon the rows of sand-coloured shelters as they stumble across the wilderness in the searing heat.

Others are brought in aid convoys that are racing to pick them up in the bush before the rains make the roads — little more than grooves in the dusty ground — impassable.

MILITIA ATTACKS

Civilians are bearing the brunt of the conflict in Darfur where two rebel groups have been battling government troops and marauding horse-riding Arab militias and fear still reigns — despite a 45-day truce agreed late on Thursday.

Issa’s family were fleeing an attack by the “Janjaweed”, an Arab militia group that targets black African farming communities in western Sudan, riding horses and camels into villages then looting and burning them.

Others in the camp at Kounoungo tell a similar tale of murder and pillage by the militias, which residents say have been armed by the Khartoum government.

“They came to attack first thing in the morning. They encircled the village on horseback. Then they started shooting,” said Sileck Mahamat Adam, 35, whose mother, brother and father-in-law were killed in one raid.

“People fled from the village every which way they could, sometimes leaving their children.”

Observers say the militia are often accompanied by the Sudanese military, which is trying to crush the rebel uprising in the region and has used Antonov bombers on impoverished farming communities in their efforts to do so.

Aid workers said on Friday there was no let up to the number of refugees crossing the border and assaults by militia on fleeing families have been reported in recent days, within Chadian territory.

“We can’t help people right on the border, we have to get as many as possible into the camps,” said Abdoulaye Bagayoko, the UNHCR field officer in charge of the camp at Kounoungo.

Some refugees lying quietly by their tents in the scorching heat have heard talk of the truce between the Khartoum government and rebel groups in the Chadian capital N’Djamena.

But it’s a story they’ve heard before and few envisage returning home any time soon.

“Some people thought the government would respect the last ceasefire. They thought they’d be all right to go back,” said Sileck, his white turban rippling in the breeze.

“But the Janjaweed got them.”