Cruelty and killing widespread in Sudan’s Darfur
By Nima Elbagir
BURAM, Sudan, April 11 (Reuters) – Sudanese hospital worker Ali Ibrahim watched armed men kill a patient he was trying to heal by ripping out his intravenous drip and pouring it dry.
Aid workers in Sudan often hear tales like Ibrahim’s from the troubled western Darfur region, wracked by violence which U.N. officials have called ethnic cleansing.
African rebels in Darfur — who accuse Sudan’s Khartoum- based government of neglecting the arid Darfur region and arming Arab militias to loot and burn their villages — launched a revolt in February last year.
“They (the rebels) found a police officer lying sick in the hospital and they shot him in the head. After they killed him they wrapped him in a sheet, doused him in petrol and burnt him,” said Ibrahim, who lives in Buram, a Southern Darfur town.
Buram is one of the few areas in remote Darfur where Arab tribes are not nomadic and are in competition with African farmers for dwindling resources.
The town, about 900 kilometres southwest of Khartoum, was attacked by African rebels in March. At the time, government media reports reported two people killed in the offensive, but local tribal leader Salih al-Ghali told Reuters 48 people died.
“Our social fabric has been torn apart… we knew how to live together in peace,” he said of the Arab population’s centuries-old good relations with African villages.
“But now they burn our neighbourhoods… 11 children were killed in our hospital,” he said.
DEEP-ROOTED CONFLICT
Awad Baddawi, director of Buram’s only primary school, said the rebels wanted to wipe out all the Arabs.
“They want to eradicate the Arab race from the area. They killed all our people,” he said, eerily echoing the words uttered by tens of thousands of African refugees encamped on the Chadian side of the border, who tell of marauding Arab militias targeting and executing African tribesmen and raping the women.
Governor of Southern Darfur state, Adam Hamid Musa, said drought and desertification since the early 1970s had displaced many tribes from the north to the south, causing competition over scarce water and pasture resources.
“In the past Darfur used to be a model of peaceful coexistence. But since 1972 the drought and desertification … caused friction between the nomads and the sedentary communities,” Musa told Reuters.
But the head of security for a Darfur locality said Khartoum did not have the resources to enforce order in the region and issued a general call to arms after the rebellion began.
“The majority of those who responded were Arabs. Mainly because the Africans… would not fight their brothers,” he said on condition of anonymity.
“The history of ethnic conflict in this part of Sudan… has deep roots. Yes the Arab tribesmen did have their own personal agenda and their old scores to settle,” he added.
Sudan and the rebels agreed to a 45-day ceasefire on Thursday and access for relief groups in Darfur, where the United Nations warns of a humanitarian crisis. U.N. officials estimate the fighting has displaced more than 750,000 people and killed about 10,000.