Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
May 14, 2006 Sunday
DARFUR: INSIDE THE CRISIS
Where the Despair Begins
By Tina Susman. Staff Correspondent
NYALA, Sudan
Early in the morning on Feb. 27, Fatina Abakar began a three-mile trek through the desert, a thrice-weekly trip she endures to gather wood for her family's cooking fires.
Hidden behind a distant ridge, dozens of armed men on camels waited, eyeing the wiry 15-year-old as she and scores of other women and girls trudged barefoot through the thick sand, their colorful wraps whipping like fluorescent flags against the khaki-colored landscape.
The men's plan: trap as many women as possible, rape the young ones and kill anyone who puts up too much of a fight. But the women, squinting into the searing wind as they scanned the ground for sticks and bark, spotted the predators a couple hundred feet ahead. They shouted: "Janjaweed! Janjaweed!" - the word that in Arabic translates loosely to "an armed man on a horse," and has come to define the Arab militiamen preying on non-Arabs like Fatina and her companions, borne of Darfur's indigenous African tribes.
The women turned and ran, most dropping whatever wood they had gathered. As they scattered, the marauding men and their mounts hurtled over the ridge toward the women, guns drawn.
"We heard shooting. When we started to run, they tried to make us run between them and the camp," Fatina said after scampering back to Kalma camp, home to these women and to 96,000 other people displaced by war in Sudan's southwest Darfur region. Breathless following her hurried trek, Fatina pranced excitedly in the hot sand and spoke in the giddy tone of someone who had just dodged a horrible fate and was eager to tell others about it.
"In front of me, there were five camels!" she exclaimed. "We ran! We escaped!"
So, miraculously, did the others, and as Fatina spoke, scores of other women trickled in from the desert, some still clutching precious hauls of wood, some carrying babies on their backs, some empty-handed and nearly staggering after the long, hot walk. They lingered at the edge of the camp and stared into the distance, at clouds of sand roiling beneath the tires of troops sent to investigate the incident.
Then, the women headed down a narrow path through the scrub into the heart of Kalma, a 7-square-mile labyrinth of makeshift tents and mud-brick huts that is supposed to be their refuge but has become their prison.
"These things happen every day," said Naser Bashier Kambal of the Amel Center for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, a Sudanese organization that helps victims of Darfur's war. "It's something systematic that is going on," said Kambal. "If they find women, they rape. If they find men, they kill. Every day such things happen and no one intervenes. They just move on."
Kambal's words capture the plight of Darfur, a region about the size of Texas, where a war between black African rebels and Sudan's Arab-dominated regime evolved into a state-sponsored ethnic cleansing campaign that, by some estimates, has killed 400,000 civilians and left millions struggling to survive.
Although the government and one of the three main rebel groups signed a peace accord May 5, nobody expects things to change quickly for people like Fatina. Two rebel groups oppose the deal, and the government has yet to accept the idea of UN peacekeepers to implement the agreement. In addition, the plan gives the government a full five months to disarm the dreaded janjaweed - months during which there will be no formidable force on the ground to protect civilians.
The war's fuse is lit
The war began in February 2003 when rebels, accusing the government of neglecting the remote region and its indigenous people, launched a series of assaults on military installations. The government, looking to bolster its forces there, mobilized nomadic Arab tribesmen with historic grievances against the non-Arab tribes. It promised the recruits land, livestock and other spoils of war, then - according to witnesses, the United Nations, and human rights groups - turned them loose on civilians sharing the same ethnicity as the rebels.
If anything symbolizes the plight of those civilians today, it is camps like Kalma where some 2 million people live on the edge of extinction, surviving on international charity for food and medicine, and risking rape, robbery or death if they step outside. The 7,700 African Union troops have never had the manpower or mandate to fend off marauders who, according to the UN and other groups, have operated with government support.
Numbers too big to ignore
The death toll and suffering are staggering. According to international health and human rights groups:
Anywhere from 180,000 to 400,000 people, nearly all civilians, have died. Precise figures cannot be obtained due to the region's inaccessibility and a breakdown in record-keeping resulting from the war.
Nearly half the population of 6 million would go hungry without international food aid.
Countless thousands of women and girls have been raped.
About 2 million people, nearly all members of the tribes that once led sedentary farming lives across the region, are trapped in squalid, crowded displaced camps, where shelter comes mostly from plastic tarps draped across sticks shoved into the sand.
Even there, they are not safe.
"I'm scared. Why? Because I have no shelter," said Shay Kwaja, a woman of about 30, as she sat on the back of a horse-drawn cart on one of Kalma's narrow, maze-like dirt roads, where donkeys, horses and pedestrians somehow managed to avoid bumping each other. She, her sister, and her 12-year-old son had come to Kalma camp in mid-February after fleeing another camp, Beleil, a few miles away following repeated attacks there.
"There are people coming at night to loot animals and property, and some people were killed, so we decided to evacuate to Kalma," Kwaja explained.
After a few days at Kalma, though, they were heading back to Beleil because they were registered to receive food aid there and not at Kalma. It was a wretched choice: security or sustenance. As they prepared for the bumpy ride, it was clear they dreaded going back.
"Even yesterday some attackers came and started to shoot and killed two people," Kwaja said, relating news she had received from others at Beleil and speaking in the solemn tone of someone resigned to a terrible fate.
"Really we fear, but we have to go back anyway," she said as the horse clattered away toward a pastel beige and green landscape, where leafless baobab trees, shorn of most branches by people foraging for firewood, offered the only relief from the searing sun.
That people continue to flock to these camps gives an indication of how bad things are on the outside.
From the war's beginning, civilians told of government aircraft and ground troops attacking their villages, and of armed men on horses and camels - the janjaweed - raping women, killing men, torching homes, poisoning water wells and looting everything from clothes to cooking pots.
Physical evidence supported the claims.
Shortly after the war's start, international aid workers were faced with burgeoning crowds of starving, ill civilians fleeing across the border into Chad. Photographic evidence showed the skeletal remains of men, women and children scattered across the desert and revealed large blackened circles on the pale landscape - the charred remains of thousands of homesteads.
So compelling was the evidence that the Bush administration in 2004 accused Sudan's government of genocide. One year later, the UN Security Council took the unprecedented step of referring Darfur to the new International Criminal Court in the Hague, which is pursuing an investigation into alleged war crimes.
Al-Bashir deflects world opinion
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has dismissed the accusations as an invention of Western powers - particularly the United States - looking to meddle in another Muslim, oil-producing country. In March, al-Bashir even accused some of the people living in camps like Kalma of being fake war victims, out to cadge free food and medical care from international aid groups.
"Some people rented out their houses in the city and left for the camps," he insisted during an appearance on Arabic language TV channel Al-Jazeera.
In reality, the camps, while providing basic needs, are sprawling shantytowns in a region of unworldly desolation. Water is scarce, food is rationed and shade is fleeting. Hot winds forever reshape Darfur's sand dunes, sending clouds of blinding dust through the air. Infants, children, their parents and often their parents' parents share tiny tents or huts, where privacy and tranquility are non-existent. Going to the toilet requires a quarter-mile walk to rows of portable latrines in temperatures that can hit the 90s in winter and that soar well past 120 during the summer.
Given the reality on the ground, al-Bashir's comment seems surreal, but it is typical of the brash self-confidence he has displayed in the face of international condemnation of the Darfur war. A former soldier who seized power in a 1989 coup, al-Bashir maintains an ironclad grip over his massive and troubled nation. Just as he has bolstered his position in past civil strife by playing Sudan's ethnic groups and tribes against one another, he did the same in Darfur by paying Arab tribes to target non-Arabs, according to a commission appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
The commission's 177-page report, based on interviews with civilians, government officials, Arab tribal leaders and others, accused Sudanese soldiers and militiamen of "indiscriminate attacks, including killings of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape ... pillaging and forced displacement throughout Darfur."
Words and wounds of those affected
It doesn't take long, once in Kalma, to be convinced. Men and women approach visitors without hesitation and wait patiently in line to share their horror stories. As they speak, they often shake their heads in bewilderment at the brutalities directed at them, and at the losses they have suffered.
On a small hill surrounded by bleating goats and squealing children in Kalma, Anour Mohamed Kuku leaned on a pair of crutches and told of the ambush that destroyed his village in South Darfur in December 2004.
Hundreds of troops, from men on camels and horses to soldiers in trucks with mounted machine guns, moved into the village late one night, said Kuku, a tall, lean 20-year-old with wide, solemn eyes.
"These people came in a very big number, with camels and horses. They attacked us, they burned things," Kuku said quietly as other Kalma residents stood around him, some nodding their heads to indicate that they were familiar with such scenarios.
The attack was so sudden that Kuku, who was sleeping outside his hut, never had a chance to escape. "One of the attackers stood over me," Kuku said. "He didn't say anything. He just shot me."
Some of the bullets blew off his kneecap. Others sliced through his neck.
Kuku pulled back the collar of his white, button-down shirt to reveal a hideous jagged scar in the middle of his neck, its color far lighter than his deep black skin. Straining on his crutches, which sank into the deep, soft sand with each step, he then made his way back to the privacy of the hovel he calls home and raised a trouser leg to reveal the remains of his leg - a mid-thigh stump.
The same month, attackers targeted Faisa Mohamed's town. Now 18, she cradled her year-old son, Safa Daoud Tom, who was born in Kalma, and smiled sweetly while offering a simple and brutal wrap-up. "I remember the boys and the men being killed. These people were chasing them on their horses and then shooting them," she said.
Some fled on their donkeys. Others, like Mohamed, her parents and five siblings, lost their livestock - forced to walk for two days to reach Kalma.
'They burned our village'
Testimony by new arrivals, such as 40-year-old Jido Abakar, indicates that government troops were still taking part in such attacks as recently as December. Abakar was adamant that he had seen a green military vehicle during the chaos that came with a 9 a.m. attack on his village, Tiwal, that month.
"I started to come outside to see what was happening. I saw a good number of men on camels and horses," said Abakar, his cheerful demeanor a sharp contrast to his grim surroundings on a blazing patch of sand at the camp's outer edge. "These people were all armed. They killed people. They burned our village. They had machine guns."
It was the second such attack on Tiwal.
Abakar and hundreds of others from the village made their way to Kalma and, despite the wretched conditions, none was willing to return to Tiwal.
"No, no, no. Not safe there," said Abakar, who by virtue of his limited English had become the group's de facto spokesman. "We just cannot trust the government, because the government promises us safety, but this attack is the second time this has happened."
Fifteen miles away at Otash, another displaced persons' camp, Mohamed Salih Moussa, 45, explained the method of attack. "What happens is people come on horses and camels, they take things from people - goats, cows. If you resist, you are immediately killed," said Moussa, tall and dignified in flowing white robes and a turban. "This is why men are being killed - because they are trying to defend their homes," he added, by way of explaining why there were so many more women than men in the camp.
Nearby, several women who had arrived at Otash a day earlier perched beneath bits of rags draped between sticks, the best shelter they could muster. All had fled the town of Mershing, and all had lost track of their husbands in the chaotic scramble. "God knows how long we will remain here, but we will not go back," said Hawaya Abdel Mohamad, shaking her head back and forth.
Asked who attacked their towns, everyone gave the same answer: janjaweed.
It is a catch-all term that victims have used to lump together soldiers, paramilitary fighters and non-uniformed, armed men on horses and camels. All worked together, according to survivors as well as international investigators, with government troops usually conducting the initial raids and then clearing the way for informal troops to loot, rape and burn whatever was left standing.
Sanctioned ethnic cleansing?
It was a clear case of ethnic cleansing, said one of al-Bashir's most outspoken critics, Salih Mahmoud Osman, a Darfur human rights lawyer and the founder of the Sudan Organization Against Torture, which offers free legal aid to victims of human rights abuses.
"The government gave them money, camels, horses, guns," Osman said, referring to Arab tribesmen. "Most important, the government promised to give them land after the displacement of the Fur," he added, referring to the region's largest tribe, for which Darfur is named. "This is the promise and the deal between them and the government. The government is the one who controls them, who uses them whenever and however they want."
Osman is a Fur and has been jailed and tortured by al-Bashir's regime more than once, but his allegations are identical to those made by international organizations - including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and by the UN commission in its report on Sudan - in response to accusations that have thrown a veil over Darfur.
Isolating the world veils genocide
The government has blocked the deployment of UN troops, hampered the work of the African Union troops in the region by withholding jet fuel and equipment from them, and stepped up efforts to keep foreign journalists, aid workers and foreign dignitaries out by refusing them the travel permits needed to reach Darfur. Even after the peace agreement's signing, al-Bashir had not dropped his resistance to letting UN troops into the region.
The result has been a lack of information from Darfur, which could give the impression that the crisis is over. If anything, aid workers, diplomats and human rights investigators say, it got worse in the past six months because as long as no one was watching, the government and its allied militias could operate with impunity.
"Many people think the situation has improved," Osman said. "It's not true. There are no more villages to be destroyed. The ethnic cleansing has succeeded."
Nobody disputes the ethnic and tribal dimensions of the war in Darfur, which translates to "homeland of the Fur." But the conflict goes far beyond skin color and clan affiliations, and is rooted in generations-old conflicts over grazing, water and pasture rights that traditionally pitted Arab nomadic tribes against peasant farmers of non-Arab ethnicity.
Tensions often would erupt into violence, particularly when droughts drove the nomads further into the areas traditionally occupied by farmers. But it was simple at that time, said Osman. Things could be negotiated among tribal leaders and, while violent clashes occurred, the tribes would settle up and go their separate ways.
Simmering tensions led to attack
That changed in February 2003, after a rebel group calling itself the Darfur Liberation Front launched the first of a number of increasingly bold attacks. The next month, it renamed itself the Sudan Liberation Army and accused Khartoum of "marginalization, racial discrimination exclusion and ... policies amounting to ethnic cleansing" against non-Arabs in Darfur. Soon, it was joined by a second rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement.
The government, nearing a settlement to end a north-south civil war then in its 20th year, responded with a vengeance, driven in part, critics say, by the determination to avoid another long, costly conflict.
Government aircraft were sent to bombard rebel-held villages from the air, with no concern for civilian casualties. The African Union even accused the government of repainting some of its aircraft and ground vehicles white, the same color as AU vehicles, to try to disguise government involvement in such incidents.
Civilians' state of destitution
Civilians who got in the way were killed. Young women and girls often were raped. Those who survived fled and, if they survived the trek through the desert, ended up in places like Kalma.
Many of the estimated 300 camps and informal settlements for displaced people in Darfur have Sudanese police stationed inside or nearby, but that's no guarantee of safety. In fact, Kalma residents last May became so enraged at what they said were police abuses at their camp, including arbitrary arrests and robberies, that they burned down a government office on the camp premises and chased police away.
Now, government officials no longer enter Kalma.
African Union civilian police are present at some camps, such as Kalma, but are few in number and have neither weapons nor powers of arrest.
That means they can do little to protect camp residents who, once outside, are vulnerable to attack. It is a threat Fatina is well aware of, but ending the firewood treks is not an option. "We need the firewood for cooking," she explained, speaking as one who could not imagine any other way of cooking. Not only that, many women use the wood to make charcoal and sell it to others in Kalma. It provides a crucial source of income to people whose wealth, once measured in terms of livestock, is now zero.
This state of destitution means that even with a peace deal, people will be in no position to leave the camps for months. They have neither the means to restart their lives, nor the faith that they will be safe if they resettle in their villages.
Lately, the conflict has spilled across the border into Chad, whose border region with Darfur shares the same ethnic balance. Chad's president, Idriss Deby, accuses Sudan of exporting the unrest to undermine his government. Sudan denies the allegation and, in turn, accuses Deby of backing Darfur's rebels.
That raises the specter of a far worse civilian crisis spanning two countries.
"This is a big problem," Kambal, at the Amel Center, said of the spiraling violence. "The killing will be going on and on, with no one to stop them. God knows what will happen in the future."
May 14, 2006 Sunday
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DARFUR: INSIDE THE CRISIS;
Using rape as a weapon of war
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
NYALA, Sudan - The gunmen eyed the 11 women for a few moments, as if scanning a menu. Then they chose three: Buthereina Hassab el-Dama, her sister and their cousin.
"These two men who took me - one was doing the action, and the other was threatening me with a gun," el-Dama, 22, recalled, adjusting the lavender shawl framing her face and narrow shoulders.
Rape is a word few people can bring themselves to utter here, least of all those who have been through it, but el-Dama's euphemism was clear as she shared her story in the fading light of a hot, Saturday afternoon. It is a common story in Darfur, where human rights groups say soldiers and militiamen loyal to the Arab-dominated government have used rape as a weapon in their war against non-Arab tribes - a charge the government denies but that is supported by scores of reports based on victims' stories.
Nobody knows how many women have been victims of war-related rapes here, because of reluctance to report the crime, but victims' advocates say the number is in the tens of thousands. The signing of a peace deal May 5 between the government and the main rebel group isn't likely to change that, they say, because of the lack of security on the ground in Darfur.
"In war, any tactic an aggressor can use to demoralize his enemy works in his favor. Rape does just that," said Janet Kerr, a psychologist and sexual violence expert who works in the Kalma displacement camp, outside Nyala, with the international aid group Doctors Without Borders. "It is a very effective way to undermine an enemy."
In a four-month period last year, Doctors Without Borders treated nearly 500 rape victims at various locations in Darfur and said in a report that this was "only a partial representation" of the actual number. A commission appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to investigate war crimes in Darfur, which visited the region three times, agreed and put the blame squarely on Sudanese soldiers and allied militiamen. The commission investigators said there were "far fewer" allegations of rape by rebel forces, who are drawn from the generally darker-skinned, so-called African tribes of Darfur.
No safety in numbers
Of the victims surveyed by Doctors Without Borders, 81 percent said their attackers wore uniforms either of the Sudanese military or one of the country's recognized militias. There was no safety in numbers, the report said, noting that 65 percent of those queried had been attacked while in a group.
"They take the young ones, leave the old ones, and rape them," said Jane Lindrio Alao, a social worker at the Amel Center for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, a Sudanese human rights and legal aid group. "When we ask [victims] why they think these people did this, they'll say that during the actual rape, the man said that maybe he did it because she was a Fur," Alao said, referring to the tribe prevalent in Darfur.
"Especially when you are black, they'll say it is because you are against the government. Sometimes they rape them because of their color," Alao said. "Sometimes because they accuse them of supporting rebels. Sometimes because they just want to."
In the past two years, the Amel Center has pursued more than 30 rape cases just in Nyala but has seen only two convictions, both on lesser charges. Two soldiers had been charged with raping a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old girl as they fetched firewood outside Otash, a camp for displaced war victims in Nyala. The charges were dropped to assault. Each soldier received 80 lashes and three months in jail. The only thing unusual in that story is that the men were punished at all, said Alao.
El-Dama's account is more typical.
Dividing and conquering their victims
It happened Aug. 12 as she was heading from her hometown in the troubled region of Shearia to Nyala, where she attends classes at the University of Nyala. On the highway a few hours outside Nyala, about 35 armed men stopped the van, says el-Dama, whose wide, coffee-colored eyes and dark, glowing skin make her easily recognizable as a non-Arab.
First, the Arab-looking men, some in military uniforms, made the occupants lie on the blistering ground as they ransacked the van. Then, they separated the men from the women. The 16 men were marched off in one direction. The women were taken in another, off the road and out of sight of passersby.
As the others were held at gunpoint, two men took each of the three targeted women into the thorny brush and raped them.
As el-Dama lay on the dirt, being sexually assaulted, beaten and choked to the verge of unconsciousness, her attackers accused her of being "Tora Bora," a term used to describe rebel sympathizers. She thought they would kill her, she says, putting her hands around her neck to mimic her assailant's action. In fact, she begged them to kill her. Better to die than to be forever known as a rape victim and possibly shunned by society, el-Dama figured.
"The man said no, we won't kill you, we'll just do what we are doing, and then we will leave you," she recalls.
In an hour, they were done. They let el-Dama and the rest of the passengers go and disappeared on their camels.
Government denies charges
Sudan's government has denied allegations of mass rape. It was so angered by the Doctors Without Borders report that security officers briefly detained two of the agency's officials on charges of spreading false information.
Wartime rape, including the taking of women and girls as sex slaves to soldiers, is not new, but in Islamic societies such as Darfur, it is particularly destructive to victims. Most resign themselves to solitary lives, because of the social stigma rape carries. Few are willing to report the crime to police, who Alao said are notoriously unsympathetic. Those who do not may face an even worse consequence. If they become pregnant through rape, they may face criminal charges for violating Islamic laws governing extramarital sex.
Amel encourages women to file criminal complaints, but Alao acknowledged that it is a hardship for victims, who battle to be believed.
After el-Dama arrived in Nyala several hours after the rape, she, her sister and cousin went directly to police. The authorities dismissed the accusations. "They said nothing has taken place. They said it was impossible this had happened," she said. Not even the doctor who examined them would admit they had been raped, despite bruises on their bodies, torn clothing and the marks on el-Dama's neck. Alao said this is common, because doctors fear being dragged into a politically charged case if they confirm rape.
A few days after el-Dama was attacked, a relative who had been in the taxi-van spotted one of her rapists in Nyala's bustling market. El-Dama's brother went to police, who arrested the man and searched his belongings. They found bits of el-Dama's clothing, but as far as el-Dama knows, the man has not been prosecuted.
"I get so angry, but what can I do?" she said. "I've started to live my life like before, slowly by slowly. I left his person in the hands of the almighty."
That is probably the best she can hope for. "I think nothing will happen to him," Alao said disgustedly. "The man is probably free."
