Silence Is Killing

THREE-YEAR-OLD Tagalo was asleep when an early morning raid by Sudanese Arab horsemen – known as Janjaweed – left him with a shattered right leg. The same hail of bullets killed his baby brother and seriously injured his mother. His father had already fled their village in Chad, close to the border with Sudan’s western Darfur region. The whole family was one of the thousands falling victim to the spillover of conflict from Sudan into their country.

The massacres in Tiero, where Tagalo’s family lived, and the neighbouring village of Marena, on March 31, 2007, killed about 400 people. As the news spread, more than 10,000 villagers from the immediate area fled into the bush, bringing to about 140,000 the number of Chadians uprooted by violence over the past year. In the days following, many women and children died of thirst and exhaustion, having left in too much of a hurry to take water. Those who survived had to share food aid with quarter of a million Darfuri refugees already in Chad, while behind their villages were a mass of burnt out huts, smashed clay pots, and belongings strewn on the red-brown soil. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air around their former homes and rotting carcasses of donkeys lay where the animals had been tethered.

Escalating conflict

The Tiero and Marena atrocities have been amongst the worst of a four-year conflict that has engulfed the western Sudanese province of Darfur and surrounding areas. The destruction of Chadian villagers also demonstrated how the conflict has escalated into an even more deadly regional crisis, which has been described as “genocide” by the US and is still growing in intensity despite all international efforts to stop it.

About 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced since the conflict flared in Darfur in 2003. What started as a rebellion against Khartoum by a limited number of black African ethnic groups in western Sudan has now escalated into a proxy war between Sudan and Chad, and is in danger of spreading to other states in the region. The Sudanese and Chadian governments suspect each other of destabilisation and, with Arab raiding parties making an appearance in the northern tip of the Central African Republic (which borders with Chad), that country too could be drawn into conflict. It is clear that the Sudanese government of President Omar al-Bashir has fuelled the conflict by arming the Janjaweed militia, reinforcing them with Arab convicts and pumping them up with rhetoric about Arab supremacist ideology.

The Land of the Fur

Yet, deeper roots of the disaster stretch back to the mid-1980s when a ferocious drought and famine transformed Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa. It killed more than a million people and laid waste livestock herds. The pastoralists of Darfur started clashing with its farmers, and both sides began arming themselves. One aid worker told of meeting a nomadic leader in 1985, at the height of the drought. The desert was visibly advancing as the Saharan winds blew sand into the more fertile hills where the sheikh’s clan were grazing their camels. His world was falling apart. Many pastoralists who had lost their camels and goats tried their hands at farming, but as latecomers with no ancestral land rights, they had to make do with rocky, semi-barren terrain, and could only look with envy towards the rich alluvial soil belonging to the long-established African tribe, an offshoot of the Fur people. Darfur means literally the Land of the Fur. Those who are prepared to kill, rape and pillage today were drawn from the ranks of the desperate, ripped from their traditional way of life by a catastrophic change in the weather, linked to global warming.

In May this year, the international criminal court at The Hague announced that it had issued arrest warrants for a Janjaweed militia leader and a Sudanese government minister suspected of involvement in atrocities in Darfur. However, Khartoum said it had no intention of handing over the men – Ali Muhammad al Abd-al-Rahman and Ahmad Muhammad Harun, the state minister for humanitarian affairs – who are accused of 41 and 50 counts respectively of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The men are alleged to have had lead roles in joint army and militia attacks on four western Darfur villages in 2003 and 2004, where hundreds were murdered. Human rights groups applauded the action, which was a first for Darfur. But Sudan’s government, fearing that further prosecutions could hit ministers all the way up to the president, insisted that the Court has no jurisdiction over it.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Darfur, a small African Union force was trying to police an area the size of France and failing to protect more than just a handful of civilians.
Then in June, Paris hosted a meeting of senior officials from the UN and more than a dozen countries aimed at providing funds and other support for international efforts to stabilise Darfur. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the meeting as “a renewed push in which we can come together and look again at what we need to do”. She acknowledged that the international community has failed in its responsibility to halt the killings in Darfur. However, none of the conflict’s protagonists – Sudan, Chad or the Darfur rebels – were invited. And, perhaps surprisingly, the African Union, the region’s existing peacekeepers, declined to attend. Sudan agreed that month to a combined United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force of more than 20,000 troops and police, but many diplomats have doubted that Khartoum will keep its word. Even with Sudan’s complete acquiescence it is likely to be 2008 before most of the troops arrive.

Sudan’s responsibility

“For four years the international community has dithered and issued ultimata which are rarely acted upon, while the Government of Sudan has colluded in the systematic asphyxiation of Sudanese Africans and the seizure of their land and livestock,” said Lord David Alton, an officer of Britain’s All-Party Sudan Group, in May. He warned that “Khartoum has become emboldened by our indifference and now they are fomenting, with impunity, a similar campaign of terror against Darfurians who have fled across the border, also dragging into the conflict hundreds of thousands of people from Chad and the Central African Republic”. He felt humanitarian agencies are warning of another Rwanda “but no-one seems to be listening”.

George Clooney and Steven Spielberg are among the Hollywood celebrities who have raised international awareness about Darfur. In April, Spielberg asked the Sudanese government “to accept the entrance of United Nations peacekeepers to protect the victims of genocide in Darfur”. The Schindler’s List director said the issue of genocide was especially close to him due to his work with holocaust survivors.

Worsening situation

Exasperation over the failure of the international community to halt the violence in Darfur and stop it spreading into neighbouring countries has been expressed by the Catholic Bishop whose diocese includes Darfur. “The international community should do more” Bishop Antonio Menegazzo of El Obeid said in April, “for things are not improving, they are worsening”. The bishop urged the European Union (EU) to “insist and push more for the Sudanese government to accept a UN presence in Darfur”. He felt the overstretched 7,000-strong African Union (AU) force in the region lacked authority and clout, and without United Nations intervention, “I don’t think the situation will improve”. He appreciated the humanitarian efforts being made by Church groups around the world, such as the Caritas network of Catholic agencies, to support vulnerable women and children.

The UK’s leading international aid charities joined forces in May to launch an emergency appeal to save lives in Darfur, Chad and the Central African Republic. Brendan Gormley, chief executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee, said, “We are seeing one of the greatest concentrations of human suffering right now in Darfur and Chad”. Two-thirds of the population of Darfur were completely dependent on food aid. The Christian agency, Tearfund, found that at El Neem camp in Ed Daien, South Darfur, 30 percent of babies were malnourished – double the level considered to be an emergency. It was difficult to address the situation adequately with new arrivals pouring into the camp every day. Medicines Sans Frontieres also called attention to the “enormity of humanitarian needs” for people in Darfur and eastern Chad. A spokesman said that same month that, “we cannot understand why the international community’s response before a crisis as serious as this is, has been so slow”.

Millions of people in the Darfur region are now living as displaced people in vast camps, their homes constructed largely of sackcloth or plastic sheeting stretched over structures made of branches. Cardboard boxes, discarded sacks, bits of tin are all used to repair homes to keep out the dust. With four million people relying on food aid in order to survive, and deplorable security conditions, the Darfur crisis continues to be, according to the United Nations, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.