FEATURE-Fear drives long trek to Kenya from Darfur

By C. Bryson Hull

KAKUMA, Kenya, March 6 (Reuters) – Fear propelled Mohammed Ahmed Osman’s two-year, 1,800 km (1,120 mile) flight from Sudan’s Darfur region to Kenya, but anger, he says, will bring him home.

Food distribution at Kenya’s Kakuma camp. (UNHCR).

The farmer never imagined Kenya, to where thousands of fellow Sudanese from the south fled in a 21-year civil war, would be his first taste of safety after marauders slaughtered most of his village in a separate conflict in western Sudan in November 2002.

But by foot, plane, train, truck and donkey, Ahmed and 21 friends and family criss-crossed Sudan and arrived in Kakuma camp in northwestern Kenya, the dusty desert home to 86,000 refugees from eight African countries.

Nearly 60 percent are Sudanese, but Ahmed’s group makes up just over half of the 42 refugees in Kakuma from the Darfur crisis that has pitted non-Arab rebels against Arab militias. Nearly all the Sudanese in Kakuma fled the civil war in nearby southern Sudan.

“If I go back to Darfur, I will kill the Arabs. If I had power, I would go. We have no power here,” he said, standing in front of his home of just a few weeks in Kakuma Three, the last built of three mud-hut complexes set atop red-tinged sands.

“We did not want to come to Kenya. We did not know about it,” Ahmed said.

Terror sparked his flight in November 2002, when marauding militiamen known as Janjaweed torched his north Darfur village, Masmaji, killing his two brothers, his parents, three nieces and dozens of neighbours.

“They came at night and burned the houses and they went back and shot anyone who ran away from the fire. They took children around the back and shot them,” he said.

“NOT THE TRUTH”

Ahmed, his wife and three children were out in their sorghum fields when the raiders came, and they only returned to their razed, lifeless village two days later.

They fled for nearby Habila but, warned of impending Janjaweed attacks, they moved again.

“I decided to go to Chad, because it was near, but the Janjaweed cut the way,” he said.

Their next stops were the larger Darfur towns of El Fasher and Nyala, but a few months in each with no fields to tend left the farmer in Ahmed frustrated, and his family hungry.

He bought train tickets for Khartoum, looking to go to its squalid squatter camps. Police at the train station had different ideas. Ordered to give his reasons for travelling, Ahmed replied that there was war at home.

“The security said ‘That is not the truth. You must go back to Darfur.'”

They ordered him to take the next train home, in two days, or go to prison. But luck rumbled into town. “We stopped a lorry and the driver we knew from Darfur,” he said.

Taking sympathy, the driver arranged to pick up Ahmed’s family 2 km (1 mile) out of town that night. Driving only in the darkness for two nights, the trucker drove them 230 km (145 miles) to Kadugli, near the Nuba mountains in south Sudan.

A day later, Ahmed and his starving companions, among them his severely malnourished 3-year-old son, arrived by truck in Kauda, a stronghold of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement.

It was just two weeks after the former rebel group had signed a landmark peace agreement with the government, ending Africa’s longest-running civil war.

“We’ve just stopped the war here. We have nothing to give you,” Ahmed said the SPLM told him. But they arranged for his group’s passage to Kakuma, where many thousands of southern Sudanese had fled the long war in their region.

Ahmed said he wishes for an end to the violence wracking his homeland, but his anger now is greater than his capacity to forgive.

“We, the black man and the Arab, cannot live together. If the war stopped, we cannot live together, because they did bad things. If I went back to Darfur, I would kill all Arab people,” he said, his hand trembling.