Empty villages mark trail of Sudan’s hidden war
By Carter Dougherty, The Observer
WEST DARFUR, May 30, 2004 — Straight, black lines of ash run through the village of Jimeza, where straw fences used to protect Sudanese peasants from Darfur’s hot winds. Clay pots, many of them charred from fire, lie scattered where bare feet once trod.
Most alarmingly, the shoulder-high earthenware urns in which villagers had stored enough millet and sorghum to sustain them between harvests are empty and scorched black. The livestock – cattle, goats and sheep – have all gone.
No Sudanese stayed behind to tell Jimeza’s tale – every means of survival in the dusty savannah of western Sudan had vanished. A plume of black smoke in the distance served as a reminder that Jimeza’s destiny is being played out over and over again.
Mariam Mohammed Adam wanders the area collecting grasses she can sell in the markets over the border in Chad, where she now lives. But she takes no chances with her life, which used to be a peaceful if impoverished existence in the nearby village of Tirti. ‘If I see anyone,’ she said, ‘I run.’
Darfur, the region of western Sudan that is home to five million people, now ranks as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster area, a tragedy as vast as it is political – possibly even genocidal. It is untouched by last week’s peace accord between Khartoum and rebels in the south.
For much of the last year, the regime of President Omar al-Bashir has retaliated against a new insurgency in the country’s west by driving the rural population into Chad, or into Darfur’s larger towns, leaving rebels with nowhere to hide. A fearsome local militia, known as the Janjaweed, has done most of the dirty work.
The war’s first phase has largely ended, with most of the countryside as empty as Jimeza. Around 130,000 people have taken refuge in Chad, but 1.2 million are homeless. The UN estimates that only a quarter to a third are receiving assistance.
Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, yesterday published a UN report describing how refugees are virtually imprisoned in the town of Kailek, in southern Darfur.
Khartoum-backed militiamen regularly rape women and charge fees for inhabitants to collect water or food. Malnutrition is rapidly killing the refugees, particularly the children.
Roger Winter, assistant administrator of the US Agency for International Development, has told the US Congress that between 150,000 and 350,000 will die from hunger by the end of the year due to Khartoum’s ‘policy of escalating violence and ethnic cleansing against the civilian population’.
Darfur’s conflict has festered for a decade, but turned murderous in mid-2003. The strife turns on cultural differences. Most Darfurians are settled farmers from African tribes, but they share the terrain with cattle-raising Arab nomads. All are Muslim.
Centuries of intermarriage has rendered the two groups physically indistinguishable, but al-Bashir’s Khartoum regime is Arab dominated. In early 2003, when the Sudan Liberation Army and the smaller Justice and Equality Movement rebelled against Khartoum, seizing major towns, the government responded with a ferocious campaign. In addition to its own firepower – helicopters and Russian-made planes dropping ‘barrel bombs’ loaded with deadly metal fragments – Khartoum used the Janjaweed. The Janjaweed have existed for years, but only recently has the government armed them and given them green uniforms with a red patch showing a rearing horse.
It was Janjaweed who stormed into Tirti early one morning in February. The shock of armed men galloping into the village terrorised the peasants. ‘The first thing I saw was when they rode in on horses and camels,’ Adam said. Then government helicopter gunships swooped in.
The villagers fled. But when they got to the Chad border, they realised many of Tirti’s men were missing – Adam’s husband among them. A few brave souls ventured back a few days later and found the bodies in the rocky hills beyond Tirti – they had been taken there and shot. Now Tirti is indistinguishable from Jimeza.
By the standards of Darfur, Tirti’s suffering was minimal. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby group, has documented how Janjaweed forces – in thousands of attacks across Darfur – have raped women and branded them on their hands to preserve the stigma. In other attacks they have torched mosques and defecated on copies of the Koran.
It was no coincidence that the Darfur atrocities took place while Khartoum was negotiating in Kenya with the Christian Sudan People’s Liberation Army. The Bush administration invested heavily in the southern peace process, largely because of pressure from its conservative Christian political base, and because it felt that fostering peace in Sudan would burnish the American image in the Muslim world.
The result was leverage for Khartoum, which needed only to hint at slowing its engagement in the talks to quiet US criticism of its role in Darfur. ‘Khartoum understood the politics of diplomacy, and it understood that the north-south talks gave them a free hand in Darfur,’ said John Prendergast, an analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
So Khartoum was able to flout a ceasefire signed with the rebels in April and stall the deployment of African Union monitors, now planned for next week, with virtually no international sanction. Prendergast says this dynamic will continue, as the government and the southern rebels still have months to go to reach final agreement, and years to implement it.
But if the Darfur atrocities measure up to the standard set out in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, it remains to be proved. The convention demands proof of intent – that Khartoum and the Janjaweed deliberately seek the annihilation of African Darfurians. Leslie Lefkow of Human Rights Watch said: ‘We had to make a legal judgment. At this point, we do not have sufficient evidence of intent.’