Darfur:
Waiting For The Slaughter
By Paul Vallely
16 September 2006
The
Independent
Rasha Ibrahim Adam and her children
may be about to die - just as she thought they had all escaped to safety.
The 38-year-old mother of
four children is one of the latest to flee the bombs from the Sudanese
government that have dropped on their homes. Today, she finds herself
in one of the dusty, benighted refugee camps that litter the region
of Darfur. She sits in her once bright red tob - a wrap-around dress
- that has been faded by the sand-laden wind that blows across al-Salaam
camp on the edge of the town of el-Fasher.
She was one of the 50,000
people who swelled the scorched camps for the "internally displaced"
in the past month - bringing to about 2.5 million the number of children,
women and men now homeless in a conflict that has dragged on for three
years without an end seemingly in sight. Until now, that is. Because
an end is in sight for the Darfur camps - where at least 300,000 black
African farmers have been slaughtered by the Khartoum government and
its Arab proxies, the Janjaweed militia, whose name means "devils
on horseback". One of those who died was Rasha's husband, Adam.
It could be an end so terrifying,
it defies the imagination.
The fear is that the rest
of Adam Ibrahim Adam's family - and many of the two million people of
the Fur, Massaleit or Zaghawa tribes in the camps - may soon perish
too.
The 7,000 troops of the African
Union, who have been desperately trying to protect the camps, have been
told by Khartoum they must leave Darfur at the end of this month when
their mandate runs out. Sudan has defied a UN resolution that mandated
an improved 20,000-strong blue-hatted UN force to take over.
Instead, it is sending 10,000
of its own troops to the region for what human rights observers fear
will be a brutal "final solution".
In a situation already described
by the UN as the "world's worst humanitarian disaster" the
genocide so long denied by the Arab government in Khartoum may be about
to happen.
"We're on the brink
of a massive catastrophe," said one senior Western diplomat yesterday.
"If there is no Plan B for Darfur, all-out genocide is highly likely,"
said James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust, which is co-ordinating
a worldwide protest that will take place in 32 countries tomorrow.
About 7,000 Sudanese troops
have already arrived in Darfur, with the avowed aim of crushing those
rebel groups who failed to sign up to the Darfur Peace Deal agreed in
the Nigerian capital of Abuja in May. Aid workers throughout those parts
of the province that are still accessible say the signs are that a major
new offensive will start in the next three weeks.
Government troops and military
ordnance have been pouring into el-Fasher airport for seven weeks now.
Preliminary attacks have already begun. Yesterday, there were reports
of the bombing of Dobo Madrasa, and another unnamed village, to the
east of the Jebel Marra mountains.
The day before, the government
bombed seven villages south of Tawilla town, including Tabarat and Tina,
after which about 45 vehicles carrying government troops swept into
the area. Local people fled the villages to hide in the mountains.
The tall and dignified Rasha
- her name has been changed to protect her identity - described what
happened when the government attacked her village near Kulkul. "I
was feeding my two-year-old son when I heard the plane. I knew immediately
what it meant," she said. "I started to run but didn't know
where to go.
"Then the bombs dropped
and soon everybody was running and my boy was screaming. The bombing
didn't last long but to me it felt like days, and I didn't know where
my other children were or what happened to them. Eventually, they came
running to me - they'd been hiding with friends near the mosque.
"Two people were killed
but we knew the bombers would be back, so nearly the whole village decided
to leave. All around us is fighting but to the north the fighting is
the worst so we headed south to el-Fasher.
"We walked for days
and arrived here in al-Salaam camp. We all walked together to try and
keep safe - it was very slow with young children and old women and some
of the children were abducted on the way. We still don't know what's
happened to them. Now I'm here with all my children and I thank Allah
that we are safe and alive."
But for how long? The Sudanese
government is making its preparations, brazenly, before the eyes of
the world. On Tuesday, the EU's special envoy, Pekka Haavisto, on a
three-day visit to the region, witnessed Antonov-20 planes loading bombs
in el-Fasher, the regional capital of North Darfur, in preparation for
an attack. The Sudanese military roll bombs from the doors of these
cargo planes; rights observers saw a woman and seven children injured
near Kulkul when a bomb was rolled from the back of an Antonov.
Khartoum is flagrant in its
flouting of the authority of the African Union mission in Darfur. This
week, the government seized a tanker full of AU jet fuel in el-Fasher
and used it to fill its own aircraft which are arriving daily there
delivering troops and arms.
Last Saturday, villagers
who had earlier been attacked by the Janjaweed gathered near the ruins
of their homes in South Darfur to speak to AU investigators; as they
waited for the AU helicopter to arrive, the Janjaweed attacked again,
killing 18 of the survivors of the earlier assault.
All across Darfur, people
are on the move again in the face of intensified combat. The rebel forces,
many of which have fragmented in disagreements over the Abuja peace
deal, are causing mayhem.
The region is descending
slowly into warlordism and banditry. In the lawless wild west of Sudan,
where every group now seems out for itself, aid agencies, the UN and
even the African Union force are being ambushed and robbed of supplies
and vehicles. Rebels who once rode camels and horses and carried AK47s
are now in 4x4s with rocket-propelled grenades obtained from Chad and
Eritrea.
South Darfur, which had been
quiet since the peace deal, has seen militia attacks on many villages
in the past few weeks. Gerida refugee camp south of Nyala, which previously
housed 20,000, is now the biggest camp in Darfur with 120,000 inhabitants.
Guerrillas from the rebel
Justice & Equality movement (JEM) have split from the National Redemption
Front (NRF) - an alliance of rebels who did not sign the Abuja peace
deal between the Khartoum government and the main rebel group, the Sudan
Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) - and are moving into West Darfur.
The region is in deepening
chaos. Of its six million population, two million are in internal camps
and 200,000 in camps in neighbouring Chad. Some 3.4 million are dependent
on food aid - but of them, an Oxfam spokesman, Alun McDonald, said,
4 out of 10 people are not receiving the assistance they need because
aid agencies cannot reach them.
Mr McDonald said: "Our
movement in Darfur is greatly restricted because the roads are simply
too dangerous to use. Where possible, we access places by helicopter
but most rural areas are almost completely out of bounds."
Things will get much worse
if the African Union is forced to leave. But yesterday Khartoum was
intransigent on that point.
After a meeting of the African
Union Peace and Security Council in Addis Ababa, the Sudanese Minister
for Foreign Affairs, Al-Samani Al-Wasila, insisted the AU troops, who
were due to begin a "rolling transition" to a UN peace mission,
must withdraw on 30 September.
"The government of Sudan
will not accept UN peace-keepers," he said. It has also told the
AU it will allow no further troop rotations. Instead it proposes its
own stabilisation plan which will move 10,500 more Sudanese troops into
Darfur to combat "outlaws and terrorists" there.
The signs of what that force
will do are not encouraging. In addition to the new wave of bombings,
an assault has been launched on the NRF rebels in the town of Um Sidir,
70km north of el-Fasher. The town has changed hands several times in
the past few days.
The government has told the
few aid organisations who have not pulled out that it wants to disperse
the entire camp population by the end of September. It wants agencies,
including Oxfam, to set up services in rural areas so people can be
enticed back despite the lack of security. If that does not happen one
state governor has spoken of putting barbed wire around camps "for
their own protection" - in effect ,making them prison camps.
To intimidate aid agencies,
Khartoum harasses them. The Norwegian Refugee Council, the main NGO
at Kalma camp in South Darfur, was barred from the camp last week. Aid
workers have been detained for gathering information on rapes and sexual
violence. Eight aid workers have been killed in the past few weeks.
Many aid agencies, such as
Save the Children UK, have pulled out of the region entirely. And Oxfam
has shut two offices near Kebkabiya. "It's got a lot more unstable,"
said one worker. "It's extremely difficult to operate."
It will get even worse if
African Union troops pull out. In one area where the AU used to provide
three patrols a week rapes increased from four a month to 200 when the
patrols had to be reduced to one a week.
Back in Rasha's camp at al-Salaam,
an old lady named Fatima looked on, bent-backed. She opened her gap-toothed
mouth and, gesturing around the wind-swept camp with its pitiful shelters
of bent branches, she cried: "I'm far too old for this. But I will
go home - I am not going to die here, far away in a strange camp."
Sadly, she could prove to
be horribly wrong.
Anwar Bakar, MASSACRE
SURVIVOR:
'They want to kill us because we are black'
"The problem of Darfur
began with Arabs coming and attacking villages.
"When you were going
to school, they would stop and ask you: 'Where are you going?' I would
say: 'I am going to school.' They would say: 'We are going to stop you.
Why do you need to go to school?'
"Since I was a child,
they have been asking: 'Are you Fur? Fur is abid [slave].'
"They say we are like
slaves, that they need to remove the Fur. They want to kill us because
we are black.
"This land belonged
to the Fur tribe or other minority peoples in Darfur before but they
say no, this Fur land is Arab land."
Jamila Bochra Mohammed,
RAPE VICTIM:
"When the Janjaweed
attacked our village, they came shooting and burning from all directions.
I tried to run away, but they told me to stop or they would kill me.
I was raped by five armed men. I saw other women raped and many people
killed, including my mother and my mother-in-law. They were thrown into
a fire while they were still alive, right in front of me. I was later
attacked again by the Janjaweed, in a refugee camp in Chad. This time
I was shot in the leg. Today, I am a failed asylum-seeker in the UK.
Abdirahman Abdulla,
ZAGHAWA SURVIVOR:
"I was in el-Fasher
and saw the head of a man being played with by policemen like a football.
They had accused him of being a thief. There was no proof.
"They had killed him
because he was Zaghawa, nothing else. The whole city witnessed this.
All the Arabs were celebrating.
"They carried his head
around. They said, 'Zaghawa is the enemy, Zaghawa is the enemy,' all
over the city. It was something strange."
Name withheld, Murder witness:
"I witnessed several
girls raped right in front of my eyes. They were aged between 15 and
21. We took cattle out to pasture together frequently, so I knew them.
"They were raped by
60 or 70 Janjaweed in April 2004. We were tied to trees as they raped
the girls.
"Afterwards, they also
tied them and put cotton in their mouths. The cotton was soaked in fuel.
Then they lit the cotton and burned them to death."
Adam Hessen, DARFUR
SURVIVOR
"We have a saying in
Darfur: 'The dog barks, but it makes no difference to the camel.' We
are the dogs. The world is the camel."
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited