Humanitarian Disaster In Sudan
By Samson Mulugeta
29 July, 2004
Newsday.com
BAHAI, Chad -- Umm Fahara Mohammad was fetching water at the well in her Sudanese village when she heard gunfire and the thunder of galloping horses. She flung her clay pot aside and sprinted to hide in nearby bushes. Two of her cousins collapsed in the dirt, shot dead without warning, she said.Mohammad hid for hours while the Janjaweed, an ethnic Arab militia, killed and pillaged. When she emerged, the village of Abliha was a ruin of charred huts and granaries.
Mohammad, 25, fled with her four children, the youngest on her back, into the hills of western Sudan. After six months, they ran out of food and trekked across the semi-desert plains to reach a refugee camp in Chad this month.
Thousands of villages in the Sudanese region of Darfur have suffered Abliha's fate since last year in a war that is, by most measures, the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today.
As many as 30,000 people have been killed and 1.2 million uprooted from their homes, human rights groups say. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, 300,000 are likely to die by December even if relief agencies can get food, tents and medicines into Darfur in the coming weeks.
Three weeks after Secretary of State Colin Powell and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan came to Darfur to insist that Sudan's government halt the violence and facilitate relief, attacks continue. Warfare and the start of annual rains, coupled with Sudan's resistance to foreign involvement in the crisis, means essential aid is not arriving and the ultimate death toll is likely to rise.
"There is no indication that the government of Sudan has taken real and provable steps to disarm and neutralize the armed militia, including the Janjaweed," European Union foreign ministers declared in a statement yesterday that called for sanctions against Sudan.
The Bush administration is pushing for a UN Security Council resolution that would threaten sanctions unless Sudan halts the violence in Darfur and allows aid workers into the region. Sudan denies backing the Janjaweed (whose name means armed horseman) but refugees in disparate places have told stories of Sudanese troops and aircraft supporting the Janjaweed attacks.
Pressure is growing for the United States and other Western governments to intervene militarily. Last week, Britain hinted it might send troops as part of a UN force. Thursday, Congress approved a resolution urging President George W. Bush to consider "multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide should the UN Security Council fail to act."
A 1948 UN convention on genocide, to which the United States is a party, obliges governments to move aggressively to halt and punish any instance of genocide. The administration has avoided declaring this a genocide.
Sudan, a vast country nearly a third the size of the continental United States, was created by British colonialists who patched together territories of various groups from the north and south. Since independence in 1956, Sudan's governments have been dominated by northern groups from the Nile River valley that long ago "Arabized," adopting Arab language and culture as well as Islam.
Sudanese Arabs raided the Christian and animist south for slaves for almost a century. After independence, Arab-led governments, most of them military dictatorships inspired by an Islamic nationalist vision, have fought almost continuously to dominate non-Arab groups in the west and south. That battle escalated after oil was discovered in the south, and it has left more than 2 million dead over three decades.
Government arms militias
After years of fruitless negotiations, a peace agreement was struck this year with the southern-based rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement.
Last year, however, rebels in Darfur, from ethnic groups such as the Zaghawa and Massalit, took up arms and demanded either better treatment from the government or independence. The government responded by arming the Arab Janjaweed militias.
Neither the ethnic politics nor the war in Darfur is simple, said Abdul Mohammad, an Ethiopian who worked for years in Sudan as a representative of UNICEF. "In Darfur, you find people who are dark but identify themselves as Arab," he said. "Often, you can't tell apart who is who."
Struggles for land historically have fueled wars in Darfur, especially during droughts such as the one that has afflicted the region in recent years. The Arabized tribes are mainly herders, while non-Arabs are mostly sedentary farmers.
Now the annual three-month rainy season is transforming the sandy plains on the fringes of the Sahara Desert into bogs and wadis, or rivers, that make overland travel virtually impossible. Having missed their planting season because of the fighting, the locals are totally dependent on aid.
In Darfur, "the situation is catastrophic on the scale of the [1984-85] famine in Ethiopia," which killed a million people, "and that is a terrible thing to say in 2004," said Geoff Wordley, a senior emergency officer for the UN refugee agency.
Wordley, a British logistics specialist, and other foreign human rights and relief officials say Sudan continues to drag its feet even though it has promised Powell, Annan and other leaders that it will do all possible to end the crisis.
"Khartoum is playing politics, trying to slow down aid coming in," he said.
Sudanese officials say foreigners underestimate the difficulty of pacifying Darfur.
Policy advocates such as the International Crisis Group accuse Sudan of integrating Janjaweed fighters into its army rather than disarming them.
"We're hearing reports that they are recruiting the Janjaweed into the Sudanese army" to guard camps of people uprooted by the Janjaweed, Wordley said. "The situation is putrid."
Because Sudan still is not letting relief agencies operate freely in Darfur, much of the crisis has shifted to places like Bahai, in eastern Chad. In camps scattered up and down the desert and plains along the Chadian side of the border, about 150,000 uprooted Sudanese are seeking shelter. Human rights monitors, Western government investigators and journalists trek to these isolated sites to monitor the crisis.
In the camp at Bahai, Umm Fahara Mohammad squatted before a tent, tending a small wood fire and stirring porridge to feed her children, ages 4 to 12. She stepped into the tent and sat on a thin nylon mat to speak to visitors, offering tea and food from her relief rations.
Wearing a dress too large for her thin frame, Mohammad spoke softly in her native language, Zaghawa. Her eyes often focused on something that seemed far away.
Before the Janjaweed's attack on her village in January, she said, her husband had gone to Libya to seek work. After the gunmen destroyed her village, "for six months, we hid in the mountains; the Janjaweed were hunting us." There, "going to get water was the most dangerous because that's where the Janjaweed rape girls."
Rape: a war weapon
The Janjaweed militiamen have made rape a weapon of war, according to human rights monitors.
"Men have been killed inside mosques, women raped in front of their husbands and old women killed when their homes have been set alight - all acts designed to humiliate and destroy the fabric of community life over and beyond the individual atrocity," Amnesty International said in a recent report.
Kadija Adam, a refugee in the same camp as Mohammad, showed a scar on her left leg where men shot her when she tried to keep them from raping her two nieces in Darfur two months ago.
"The girls were hiding behind my back," said Adam, 47. "After they shot me, they tried to take the girls. When they resisted, they shot them in the legs. Then they left."
For Mohammad, hiding with some of her fellow villagers in the hills, desperation deepened this month when the food ran out. The survivors turned to camel food, the seeds of a tree the Zaghawa call mohaid.
To make them edible, Mohammad soaked the pea-sized seeds in water for 10 days, changing it twice a day. When they were finally ready to eat, the seeds sustained them for only a few days.
Then Mohammad and the eight other displaced families with whom she was hiding began a desperate trek to the Chad border before the coming rains made the passage impossible.
Mohammad said her children ask every day when they will go back to Darfur.
"I always promise them we will return home," she said.
She pointed to a gold-plated wristwatch on her arm, her most prized possession and a gift from her husband. It was still set to Sudan time, an hour ahead of Chad's.
A humanitarian crisis
On Thursday, Congress declared that the civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan has become a case of genocide. U.S. officials say the death toll is likely to reach 300,000 this year.