Darfur villagers fear attacks, want to flee to Chad
By Robert Waweru
ARARA CAMP, Sudan (Reuters) – Villagers in Arara camp in Sudan’s remote Darfur region are too scared to return home and are just waiting for a chance to flee to neighboring Chad.
About 9,000 villagers live in Arara camp in West Darfur state, far from their farming fields and livelihoods.
They say marauding Arab militias, known locally as Janjaweed, have attacked them in the camp and stolen their food — provided every few weeks by the World Food Program.
“If we don’t have security here how can we be expected to go to our villages?” said Ahmed Khatir Arbabe. “We would rather go to Chad if security is not improved,” he said.
He added the people in the camp near the Chadian border were just waiting for a wadi, or riverbed, to dry up so they could flee and join more than 200,000 Darfur refugees already encamped across the border.
After years of long conflict between African farmers and Arab nomads over scarce resources in arid Darfur, rebels took up arms last year accusing Khartoum of arming the Janjaweed to loot and burn African villagers.
Khartoum denies the charge, calling the Janjaweed outlaws. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Thursday the Darfur violence constituted genocide and blamed the government and the Janjaweed.
The United Nations says the fighting has forced more than one million from their homes, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The villagers have built huts and aid agencies have provided sanitation facilities in the camps. They fled their homes last November.
But still in the camp they feel unsafe.
Arbabe said the people cannot go further than one mile out of the camp for fear of being attacked by Janjaweed. Women who go to collect firewood are raped and beaten, he said.
One woman with visible wounds on her hands said she and her sisters had been abducted in August. She escaped when the Janjaweed tried to rape her, she said, but still did not know what had happened to her three sisters.
“I was held together with three of my sisters when we went to collect firewood,” she said. “When they tried to rape me, I resisted and I snatched one of their guns and ran away.”
Local leader Dahiya Hassan said one policeman had been killed by Janjaweed in May. No police were visible in the camp, but there was a police camp about three km away.
“The number of Janjaweed is increasing instead of decreasing,” he said.
Khartoum has promised to disarm the Janjaweed and was given a month to show progress toward securing Darfur under a July 30 U.N. Security Council resolution. A new draft resolution circulated by the United States on Wednesday calls for sanctions on Sudan if it fails to stop the abuses.
(Additional reporting by Tony Njuguna)