Discovering Darfur

By Joanne Mariner, AlterNet. Posted December 13, 2004.

No one stamped our passports when we entered Darfur, in western Sudan. There were no Chadian patrols at the border to stop our two-car convoy from crossing and, more importantly, no Sudanese troops on the other side to detain us. For many miles, there were simply no human beings at all, just desert, empty villages, and the occasional corpse of a camel or a sheep.

It was late July, and we had snuck into what the rebel groups that control the area like to call “liberated territory.” But the barren and depopulated landscape we saw before us suggested defeat rather than victory. It took a few hours of driving before we came upon people: a weary group, mostly women, with babies on their backs and random household goods on their heads, making the long trek toward Chad and safety.

Over the past year and a half, since the Sudanese government and allied militia began their scorched earth campaign against the black African population of Darfur, more than 1.5 million civilians have fled their villages. On July 22, the day that two colleagues and I crossed the border into Darfur to investigate human rights abuses, the House and the Senate passed concurrent resolutions declaring the atrocities committed there to be genocide.

By their estimate, based on UN figures, some 30,000 civilians had already been killed.

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“When I was young,” our middle-aged translator said as we drove through the desert, “this area was thick with trees. You couldn't travel through here; it was impossible to cut a path.”

The link between desertification and the conflict in Darfur is much disputed. As the Sudanese government explains it, Darfur is a “tribal conflict” provoked by drastic environmental change. It is the Sahara's inexorable advance southward-turning forest into savannah and savannah into desert that has, in this view, intensified competition for land and water, and caused latent ethnic rivalries to explode into all-out warfare.

By focusing on geography and ethnicity, the government seeks to distance itself from the violence and to feign powerlessness. Yet a visit to the region reveals the speciousness of its account. As in southern Sudan, where a civil war raged for decades, ethnic militias are not independent actors but are used by the government as a proxy force. Villages studded with craters attest to the government's repeated bombing attacks. Unexploded ordinance dropped from airplanes and helicopters offers further proof. And while locals relate atrocities committed by camel-riding Arab tribesmen, they say the men on camels are frequently accompanied by army soldiers in government vehicles.

Stopping at an abandoned village near the town of Farawiye, we spoke to an elegant, white-robed, seventy-year-old man – the area's last remaining inhabitant. His three wives and thirteen children had escaped to Chad, but he had stayed behind in hopes of tracking down the surviving livestock from their herd.

“The bombing started six months before Ramadan,” he told us. Sudanese troops later attacked the village, and Janjaweed stole the animals. All 70 families that had lived there fled. There were no rebels near the village, he claimed; nothing to justify a military attack.

The air offensive that the old man described took place in about May 2003. It was just one month after the Sudan Liberation Army, a nascent rebel group, made a daring and successful attack on the North Darfur capital of El Fasher. Small and little known before the Fasher raid, the SLA quickly gained strength. The Khartoum government, afraid of losing control of the region, began arming and supporting Arab tribal militias. Known as Janjaweed (variously translated as “armed men on horseback,” “evil horsemen,” and “outlaws”), these militias offered the government the foot soldiers it needed to combat the insurgency.

With dark skin and African features, the Arab nomads of Darfur are physically akin to the region's other inhabitants. But as they claim Arab descent and an Arab cultural identity, they make a convenient local ally for the Arabist government in Khartoum.

The Janjaweed have gotten tangible financial rewards from their partnership with the government, even beyond money and weapons. Attacking civilian villages and killing or driving out their inhabitants, the militias have stolen countless herds of livestock: camels, goats, sheep and cows. And what they don't steal, they often kill.

During a visit to Khartoum in September, we tracked down and interviewed Musa Hilal, a notorious Janjaweed leader. We met him at an enormous home in an upscale neighborhood; everything about him spoke of money and power. Toward the end of our interview, we asked how many camels he owned. “It is difficult to say exactly,” he responded, unhappy with the question. “The whole wealth of the tribe is mine.”

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Stripped of their land, their animals, and their livelihood, the impoverished civilians of Darfur now face hunger and disease. Until last May, the government obstructed humanitarian aid to the region, and even now aid agencies are slow to reach civilians in rebel-held territory.

Joanne Mariner is a New York-based human rights attorney.

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