Darfur refugees executed in desert of Sudan

Julie Flint reports from Darfur where state militias are killing women and children

By Julie Flint, The Observer

April 25, 2004 — It was past midnight when the farmer finally reached his home village of Deleij in the Wadi Saleh region of central Darfur, having crawled for hours under cover of darkness. Covered in blood and with a bullet wound in the neck, he told how he had been the sole survivor among 72 unarmed African men who had been trucked away for summary execution by a joint force of government soldiers and Arab militiamen.
‘They drove us in army trucks and cars to a valley two kilometres south of Deleij,’ he told a neighbour. ‘Then they lined us up, made us kneel down and bend our heads – and shot us from behind. I was left for dead.’

On that same day, 5 March, another 65 men belonging to the Fur tribe were massacred by a similar government-militia force in the Mugjir area, east of Deleij. Nine Fur chiefs who had been arrested a week earlier were shot dead in prisons in Mugjir and Garsila, near Deleij. Word of their deaths came from relatives who had collected their bodies for burial.

‘People woke up that day – it was a Friday – to find the whole area surrounded by government soldiers and Janjaweed [the mounted Arab militia conducting joint operations with the regular army in Darfur],’ said Abdul Aziz, a neighbour of the massacre survivor. ‘Dozens of villages around Deleij have been burned by the government and many people had fled to Wadi Saleh. The government and Janjaweed came and asked men aged between 20 and 60 where they came from. If they were displaced, they took them to the police station.

‘South of Wadi Saleh there is a hill and near there a valley. They killed 71 men there that evening. It happened in Mugjir just like it happened in Deleij. They took them to the hills and killed them.’

Darfur, the westernmost region on the border with Chad, is one of Sudan’s most inaccessible areas, closed to all but a few relief agencies and almost always out of bounds to journalists.

But access has never been so difficult – nor so critical – as in the 15 months since the settled African tribes who form a majority in Darfur took up arms, under the banner of the Sudan Liberation Army, to protest at the region’s marginalisation and the government’s failure to protect African farmers from punitive raids by Arab nomads forced south by drought and desertification.

The government’s swift and bloody crackdown – first against the SLA and then, in the face of unexpectedly strong opposition, against civilians from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes – reflects the importance of the SLA rebellion in Sudan. For Darfur, unlike southern Sudan, is overwhelmingly Muslim – dramatic proof of Muslim opposition to the country’s Islamist rulers and a possible example for other marginalised groups in the all-important Muslim north.

The reasons for the mass executions in Wadi Saleh, one of the gateways to the SLA’s headquarters in the Jebel Marra mountains, can only be guessed at since there was no judicial process and the Janjaweed enjoy impunity in Darfur. An attack on government troops in the Mugjir area on 1 February suggests that the massacre there may have been collective punishment for an attack that the SLA says killed more than 100 soldiers. Taken as a whole, however, the 145 killings appear to acknowledge the fact that the backbone of the SLA’s fighting force is composed not of ‘thieves and robbers’, as the government claims, but of farmers driven off their land by a scorched-earth campaign that threatens to create an Arab Darfur.

The village of Tullus west of Wadi Saleh is one of many burnt and then occupied by Janjaweed Arabs. After attacking the village in February, soldiers and Janjaweed chased women and children into a valley and shot them in cold blood as they tried to hide behind rocks and trees.

‘They said: “You are dogs! We will drive you off this land!”‘ said Salma Zakariah Hassan, 19. ‘They told me: “You are a rebel and the son of rebels!”‘ said Hussein Da’afallah, 12, who was shot three times. The child saw three friends, aged between seven and 11, fall beside him, but does not know whether they lived or died. That, he explains, is why he is crying; not because of his disfigured face, shattered elbow and swollen, infected leg.

In the absence of monitors, a 45-day ‘humanitarian’ ceasefire, agreed in the Chadian capital N’djamena on 11 April, is a ceasefire in name only. The UN estimates that more than a million Darfurians – a fifth of the region’s population – are already displaced, many in camps in which the Janjaweed maraud with impunity. More than 100,000 have fled to Chad, where most survive by begging. UN human rights investigators have accused the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed of unleashing a reign of terror in Darfur, employing the tactics used in the war in the south – ethnic militias, scorched earth and refusal of humanitarian access.

The US Agency for International Development, USAid, warned recently that 350,000 war-affected Darfurians could die in the next year unless the Sudanese government breaks with past practice and grants full and immediate humanitarian access. Given the lack of access to Darfur, the number of dead can only be guessed at. But 25 days’ research in Darfur indicates that massacres of up to 80 civilians are not uncommon – and are almost always the result of co-ordinated government-militia action.

Despite the enormity of human tragedy unfolding unseen in Darfur, the UN Commission on Human Rights failed to adopt a robust condemnation of the atrocities there on the last day of its sixtieth session on Friday.

‘The role of the European Union, including the delegation from the UK, was very disappointing,’ says Jemera Rone, Sudan researcher of Human Rights Watch. ‘They voted for the watered-down resolution which did not condemn the crimes against humanity going on in Darfur. They also voted to adjourn before a vote was taken on a much tougher resolution. Honduras – a very small, thinly populated country in Central America – did much more for human rights in Sudan than the entire EU when it voted not to adjourn before the issue was given the serious attention it deserves.’

? Julie Flint is the author of a forthcoming Human Rights Watch report on Darfur.