In the desperate flight to escape armed militias, Sudan refugees have no time to bury the dead
By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS, Associated Press Writer
CAMP KOUNOUNGO, Chad, July 06, 2004 (AP) — On a rocky wind-swept plain in Chad, four men stand with hands lifted in prayer over a freshly dug grave.
Djali Djabir, an elderly father of three, survived the horror of a Janjaweed militia attack and weeks of flight through the Sudanese desert to die in the safety of a Chad refugee camp. Countless others were left where they fell, their families too frightened to stop and bury their dead.
For more than 16 months, armed bands of herders, most of them Arabs, have torched village after village in Sudan’s western Darfur region, driving more than 1 million black Africans from their homes in a campaign of terror U.N. officials liken to ethnic cleansing.
The United Nations estimates up to 30,000 people have died in the attacks and in the rebellion that triggered them, but some analysts say the toll could be much higher. If desperately needed aid doesn’t reach some 2 million people, the number of deaths could surge to 300,000, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Long-simmering tensions between nomadic Arab herders and their farming neighbors exploded into violence when two black African rebel groups took up arms against the government in February 2003 over what they consider unfair treatment in their struggle over land and water resources in Darfur.
The rebel groups and refugees accuse the Sudanese government of backing the Janjaweed militias, pointing to coordinated attacks supported by airplanes and helicopter gunships. The government denies the accusation and has pledged to disarm the Janjaweed.
Djabir, 69, was a prosperous farmer with a large herd of cattle before the Janjaweed struck his village. Early one morning, the family woke up to a burst of gunfire and helicopters clattering overhead.
“We didn’t have time to take anything with us, we just ran,” Djabir’s 30-year-old son, Mohammed, recounted Tuesday.
Gunmen on horses and camels chased after them as they fled.
Djabir’s nephew, Mohammed Aziber, watched in horror as a helicopter pursued his son and gunned him down under a tree where he had tried to hide. But there was no time to bury the young man.
“Every day I see my son lying under that tree,” said Aziber, 65, fighting back tears.
For more than two months the family walked from village to village, seeking sanctuary. Every time they heard another nearby village was in flames they took flight again.
For weeks, they survived on scant handfuls of millet grains soaked in water they collected from the occasional streams that cut through the vast, arid region the size of France. The adults often went hungry so the children could eat.
Many don’t survive the journey. Along the way, the Djabir family saw the bodies of others who succumbed to hunger, thirst and disease. But they didn’t dare stop.
“The Janjaweed are everywhere,” explained Youssouf Omar, 34, a neighbor in the camp who was also chased from Sudan. “If we stop to bury them, they will kill us all.”
Finally, despairing that the fighting would ever end, they crossed the border into neighboring Chad. Local villagers there helped them with food, water and clothing. But they slept under thorn trees for more months until U.N. trucks collected them and brought them to Kounoungo, a camp about 75 kilometers (50 miles) west of the border.
Exhausted from the ordeal, and with little will left to live, Djali Djabir fell ill and died three days later his family could not say what killed him. They buried him Sunday.
Almost every week, someone dies at Kounoungo most of preventable causes such as respiratory infections and diarrhea, according to health workers from the International Medical Corps.
As the rainy season begins, the risk of epidemics increases. U.N. officials say more people die now of hunger and disease than in the killings.
In a small cemetery shared with local villagers, Aziber shoos away a grazing donkey and bends over to smooth the dirt mound over his uncle’s grave.
“He wanted to die in his own village,” he said sadly. “He didn’t want to die in a foreign land.”