Sudanese government played role in burning of Darfur

By Julie Flint, The Daily Star

TERBEBA, Darfur, May 12, 2004 — Until three months ago, 500 families lived in Terbeba, only a few kilometers away from Sudan’s border with Chad. Crops grew in profusion in the surrounding countryside and the village boasted two mosques. Today all that remains of this relatively prosperous life are a handful of straw huts and a single mosque. In between the circles of ash that were once homes, small mounds of earth mark the final resting places of the 26 villagers who died here on Feb. 15.

It was a Sunday and the people of Terbeba – farmers belonging to the Masalit tribe, of African rather than Arab ethnicity – were beginning to stir when the village came under attack from government soldiers and Arab militiamen called janjaweed.

“There were four army cars … and about 300 janjaweed on horses and camels,” said the headman of the village, 49-year-old Abdullah Mohammed Hussein, speaking across the border in Chad where many homeless villagers have sought refuge among fellow Masalit. “They burned houses, stole some grain and burned the rest. They stole over 1000 cattle … They burned one of two mosques but tore up the Korans in both.”

A few days after the attack, he said, helicopter gunships circled over Terbeba. He thinks they were making sure the village was no longer inhabited.

Since August last year, the fate of Terbeba has been replicated all across Dar Masalit, the Masalit “homeland” in Darfur that corresponds roughly with West Darfur state. Regular and irregular forces have burned village after village, often backed by air power in areas away from the border where there are no international observers. Human Rights Watch documented 14 massacres in Dar Masalit – all but two reportedly committed by government and janjaweed forces acting together – in which almost 800 civilians died.

The burning of Darfur has gathered momentum ever since the Masalit and two other African tribes – the Fur and the Zaghawa – took up arms in February 2003 under the banner of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) to demand an end to their marginalization within the Arab-ruled Sudanese state and protest government passivity in the face of attacks on them by semi-nomadic Arab pastoralists. Rather than consider the farmers’ grievances, the government responded by attacking civilians in partnership with the “Arab nomads” whose incursions onto African farming lands in the drought years of the 1980s and 1990s set the fuse to inter-communal war.

With few exceptions, the once-productive Masalit countryside is now empty. Everything that sustains life – livestock, food stores, blankets and clothing – has been looted or destroyed. Villages have been torched not randomly, but block by block – often twice. The unchecked presence of janjaweed in the burned countryside has driven civilians into janjaweed-dominated camps and into towns where they have been targeted by government bombers.

Asked why Masalit accuse the government of working hand in glove with the janjaweed, the headman of Terbeba incredulously said: “Why do you ask this question? They come together, they attack together and they leave together.”

A Western diplomat in Khartoum said on condition of anonymity that government helicopters had been seen supplying janjaweed bases. “The conflict in Darfur has complicated causes,” he said. “The government did not cause it. But a year ago, after the SLA rebellion, it chose sides.”

The Sudan government maintains that the current violence is the outcome of tribal conflicts that it says have always existed in Darfur, a remote region of western Sudan with an ethnic African majority that has long been condemned to economic underdevelopment and political marginalization. But while it is true that conflicts have occurred periodically because of competition over resources, tensions between ethnic Arabs and Africans were kept under control for many years by traditional conflict resolution mechanisms underpinned by laws inherited from British colonialists.

Under the British, the movement of Arab nomads across Darfur was strictly regulated. They were permitted to move into African tribal areas between the months of January and July to graze their cattle, and had to follow prescribed routes to ensure minimal disruption to the lives of the African farmers.

But over the last decade a combination of extended periods of drought, the dismantling of traditional administrative structures and a central government policy of Arabization has conspired to transform economic tension into ethnic war. Today many of the janjaweed are armed, trained and reportedly even paid by an Islamist government with a track record of using ethnic militias against African people perceived as likely opponents.

Janjaweed attacks today exhibit a scale and degree of organization that were not apparent before the SLA rebellion. Operations are often coordinated across several fronts, with commanders communicating by satellite telephone. Their weaponry has become heavier, their fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades identical to those used by the regular army.

“The government is not merely going after a rebel group. They are going after whole ethnic groups,” said a senior US official. “Since early fall, the janjaweed have been clearing out entire areas of people – and there is no way this could have been done without direction and assistance from Khartoum.”

Relief agencies estimate that a million people are displaced across Darfur, most of them in towns and settlements controlled by the very forces that drove them from their homes. A UN inter-agency team that visited the government-controlled town of Kailek late in April reported that they were “shaken by the humanitarian state and conditions” they found among displaced people there. The team said the “clear presence” of the Janjaweed among the refugees “call for the circumstances of the displaced persons in Kailek to be described as imprisonment.”

Over 100,000 other civilians, burned out of their homes, live as refugees in Chad – only half of them so far in UN camps. The US Agency for International Development, has warned that unless the Sudanese government breaks with past practices and grants full and immediate humanitarian access, 100,000 war-affected civilians could die within the next 12 months.

Julie Flint co-authored “Darfur Destroyed,” a report published on May 7 by Human Rights Watch

A Child recalls being hunted by the military

Kaltoum Yahya grabbed her 12-year-old son Hussein and ran for her life when she was awakened by the sound of aircraft – and gunfire – early one morning in February this year.
“They came before sunrise,” she said. “They were wearing military uniforms, and were shooting at us from cars and bombing us from planes. Then they started taking our camels, cows, goats and horses, burning our villages and shooting our children. They left only two houses in the village. It all happened very quickly. There were many of them … They didn’t leave until sunset.”
Kaltoum and her son fled to a valley near their village, Tullus, along with dozens of other women and children. But the armed men who attacked Tullus – a combination of regular and irregular forces, her husband said – followed them and started shooting at them from relatively close range. Hussein hid behind a tree with three other children, all younger than him. He was shot three times – in the face, the arm and the leg. His three friends were also shot. The youngest, a girl called Fatima Haroun, was only 7 years old.
“There were seven of them,” Hussein recalled. “One of them aimed at me and shot me. I fell down. I saw three others killed and seven wounded. My father was moving about far away from me. I was calling him to come and pick me up, but he couldn’t hear me. At last he heard me and he brought me water to drink.” – J.F.