In the midst of slaughter, Sudan puts on a show
By Marc Lacey, The International Herald Tribune
NAIROBI, June 12, 2004 — Sudan’s government puts on an elaborate show when visitors come to the troubled Darfur region, where one of the world’s most desperate humanitarian emergencies is playing out.
When an entourage of United Nations officials arrived last month in Nyala, the capital of south Darfur, the show took the form of a dance performance. Drummers came onto the stage at the government guesthouse and pounded away as women in billowy robes gyrated around them.
First came the Fur, one of the ethnic groups that have been on the receiving end of recent attacks by pro-government militias. Then other ethnic groups danced their traditional dances, too.
The government portrayed the evening as a sign of how harmonious things really were in Darfur, despite the fact that more than a million black Africans had been driven from their villages by Arab militias in attacks that some U.S. officials have condemned as ethnic cleansing.
“What you saw here is very different from what you expected in Darfur,” a government official told the visitors with a smile.
Condemned around the world for its role in Darfur’s devastation, Sudan’s government is working aggressively at damage control. But playing down the crisis in Sudan’s vast west is proving a difficult exercise and the diplomatic pressure on Khartoum is not letting up.
This week the leaders at the G-8 summit meeting issued a communiqué calling on Sudanese officials to disarm the government-backed militias that “are responsible for massive human rights violations in Darfur.”
The Bush administration, increasing the pressure as well, has begun a review to determine whether the events in Darfur constitute genocide. Up until now, U.S. officials have used only the term “ethnic cleansing.”
A recent visit to some of the camps for internally displaced people that have been set up across Darfur made clear the gravity of the situation. The desperate squatters, numbering a million or more across Darfur, tell stories of murder and rape and harassment. Aid workers speak of growing sickness and looming death.
Even with government officials standing within earshot, the displaced residents blamed their woes on government soldiers, who they said attacked them in tandem with the Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed.
The government denies any links with the Janjaweed. It also dismisses the notion that ethnic cleansing or genocide has been committed in Darfur.
President Omar el-Bashir told Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, in Khartoum this week that the situation in Darfur was quiet and normal and that foreign governments were blowing the events there out of proportion, according to the Egyptian news agency MENA.
But Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a telephone interview on Friday, said that the link between the government and the militias was strong and that many people were still at risk of dying. “We have every reason to believe these militias are being supported by various instrumentalities of the Sudanese government,” he said.
Powell steered clear of the term “genocide,” but he said administration lawyers had begun a review to determine whether the conditions for genocide had been met.
“I’m not prepared to say what is the correct legal term for what’s happening,” he said. “All I know is that there are at least a million people who are desperately in need, and many of them will die if we can’t get the international community mobilized and if we can’t get the Sudanese to cooperate with the international community. And it won’t make a whole lot of difference after the fact what you’ve called it.”
In another sign that the Bush administration might take a harder line on Khartoum in the months ahead, Powell said the administration was studying whether to impose sanctions on individual Sudanese officials who had been tied to the displacement.
Sudanese officials express befuddlement at the strong U.S. criticism. “The government didn’t give anybody arms to fight on behalf of it,” Jadain Jud-Allah Dagage, minister of social affairs in south Darfur, insisted in an interview, reflecting the official view. But another official provided a more complicated version of events the next day, one that did not gibe with Khartoum’s stance.
Ahmed Angabo Ahmed, the commissioner of the Kass region in south Darfur, is a former air force general. He speaks English, which he picked up during a brief stint in flight school in the United States 20 years ago.
To control attacks by anti-government rebels in his area, Ahmed said he sought and received permission from Khartoum to enlist some of the armed robbers that rampage the countryside into the police and army. “We put these bandits as soldiers and they said they would never rob again,” he said.