Suffering lingers in Sudan’s Darfur region
By KHALED KAZZIHA, Associated Press Writer
KALMA, Sudan, May 29, 2004 (AP) — When insurgents signed a deal with the government last week to end Sudan’s 21-year civil war in the south, it did little for Musa Juma Ahmed.
Driven out of his village by Arab gunmen on horses and camels, the middle-aged man has become one of a million people made homeless by a different war in Sudan’s vast western region of Darfur.
The agreements signed Wednesday pave the way for an end to the conflict in southern Sudan and have won international plaudits for President Omar el-Bashir’s government and the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
But impoverished, Iraq-sized Darfur is not included, and the 15-month-old conflict here continues between rebels demanding a greater share of wealth and power in the country, and a government fearful that its concessions to the southern rebels will embolden rebels elsewhere.
Ahmed described the Arab raiders riding into his village, killing and looting.
“They took our animals, our food. They did not leave a thing. They did not even leave our homes. They destroyed everything completely,” Ahmed said.
He fled to Kamla, a camp of grass huts hastily put up in the desert.
Like the conflict in the south, Darfur’s reflects the hybrid nature of Africa’s largest country: part Arab, part African; part Muslim, part Christian; and always ruled from the Arab north.
Tensions have long existed between the region’s African farmers and Arab nomads, fueled by competition for land and scarce resources. But past disputes were dealt with locally by fighters using spears and swords. Now, the region is saturated with guns.
Darfur’s rebellion started in February 2003, when black African insurgents took up arms saying they had long been neglected by the government in Khartoum.
Since then, the violence has escalated. Human rights groups accuse Bashir’s Islamic government of arming Arab militia to carry out cleansing. The United Nations says 2 million people, half of them homeless, are acutely short of food and medicine, making the situation here the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.
“They tell us we are black and they are Arabs,” Ahmed said. “They say we are black Africans … They want to eject us and this is all because of President Omar el-Bashir. He gave the weapons to the Arabs to kill all the blacks and they completely destroyed us because we have nothing to eat.”
The government dismisses the allegations of ethnic cleansing, blaming rebels for the destruction. It says the agreements with the southern insurgents will help solve the problems in Darfur.
“I would like to assure you that the peace deal we have just signed will give us impetus,” Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha said Thursday. “We will begin, as of tomorrow, to double our efforts to close the page of conflict in Darfur as we closed the page of war in the south.”
The government also is accused of restricting aid workers’ access to the region. A Swiss humanitarian group says it will host a meeting Tuesday between the Darfur rebels and government officials in Geneva about getting aid to Darfur.
But in Kamla, 12 miles from Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, there is little optimism that the violence will end soon.
The camp is home to some 23,000 women, children and men who fled their villages, and another 300-400 families arrive daily, said Abdulmalik Omar, a coordinator with the U.N. World Food Program.
Children under 5 are dying at the rate of six to eight a day, he said.
“This is a very, very serious crisis.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell was among those welcoming the government’s peace deals with the south, but he warned that Sudan will not be at peace until Darfur’s problems are resolved.
That cannot come soon enough for the people in this camp, many of whom recounted tales of suffering similar to Ahmed’s.
First, government planes bombarded their villages, they said. Then the Arab militia, sometimes supported by government troops, rode in to loot and destroy what remained.
“I’m here in this camp because the government expelled me with the (Arab militia) and with the airplanes,” said Abdulkarim Issa Abdulrahman. “The only reason they are doing this is because we are not Arab … if you are not one of them, they kill you.”