Amnesty Magazine
Summer
2004Sudan's Reign of Terror
In a vast and remote expanse of Africa, a human catastrophe is spinning out of control. The conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan has already produced the "greatest humanitarian catastrophe" in the world today, according to the United Nations. In a suppressed report, a U.N. team described a "reign of terror" and found compelling evidence of "human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity." So far, the world has failed to respond.BY ERIC REEVES
"W
hen there's a catastrophe coming, people don't react until they are
counting the dead," said Simon Salimini, a coordinator with the World
Food Program.
The dead and displaced are now piling up, while the international community cuts deals, contemplates responses, and haggles over whether the crisis is ethnic cleansing or rises to the legal definition of genocide -- a designation that requires the international community to act to prevent abuses and to punish those responsible.
At the same time, overwhelmed aid workers, the few reporters who make it in, and desperate refugees escaping to neighboring Chad are providing fragmentary glimpses of devastation unfolding.
“In the Tawilah area of northern Darfur, 30 villages were burned to the ground, over 200 people killed, and over 200 girls and women raped -- some by up to 14 assailants and in front of their fathers who were later killed,” according to a U.N. report of a Feb. 27 attack. “A further 150 women and 200 children were abducted.”
These are a few of the casualties in a 15-month-long campaign of extermination and displacement that government-backed “Arab” militias are waging against indigenous African tribal groups. The U.N. said 2 million people need “acute assistance,” more than a million are internally displaced, and at least 150,000 have fled to Chad. Tens of thousands have died -- more than 1,000 people a week. And even with an immediate cease?fire, hundreds of thousands may perish from lack of food and medicine, denial of access to agricultural lands, and rising disease rates, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The imminent rainy season has set off “the most dramatic race against the clock... in the world,” said Jan Egeland, the U.N. deputy secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “If we lose, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women and children, will perish.”
Almost all the victims are indigenous African tribal populations, primarily the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit. The attackers, known as the “Janjawid,” are from Arab tribal groups that have been backed and heavily armed by Khartoum. (Both the “Arab” and “African” groups are Muslim and although both are black, “Arabs” use the term “black” as a racial slur.)
Mounted on horse and camel, some 20,000 Janjawid have been sweeping an 800-mile-long swath of the Darfur region that runs from the southern Sahara to the Central African Republic and Chad.
“Scorched?earth tactics are being employed throughout Darfur, including the deliberate destruction of schools, wells, seeds and food supplies, making whole towns and villages uninhabitable,” said Egeland.
Human rights reports on Darfur document widespread, violent gang rapes of girls and women. The U.N. team found evidence in April of “a policy of using rape and other serious forms of sexual violence as a weapon of war.”
The Janjawid are animated by racial and ethnic hatred. “You are opponents to the regime, we must crush you,” one victim told Amnesty International, quoting the words of his attacker.
“Since you are black, you are like slaves. Then all the Darfur region will be in our hands. The government is on our side. The government plane is on our side to give us ammunition and food.”
Idris Abu Moussa, a 26-year-old farmer, described a Janjawid attack: “They came at 4 a.m. on horseback, on camels, in vehicles, with two helicopters overhead. They killed 50 people in my village. My father, grandmother, uncle, and two brothers were all killed. They don’t want any blacks left.”
he roots of the Darfur conflict go back to the early 1600s, when the region, an area the size of France, was governed as a Fur sultanate ("Dar Fur" means "homeland of the Fur").
Subsequently, an influx of nomadic Arab populations sparked rivalries over the scarcity of resources, especially water and grazing land, as well as differing agricultural practices. The African tribal groups, especially the Fur and Massaleit, tend to be sedentary agriculturalists, while the Arab tribal groups are mostly nomadic pastoralists. Over time, the groups devised mediation mechanisms to avoid armed conflict. For example, when an “Arab”-owned camel herd destroyed an “African” group’s sorghum crop, the parties negotiated compensation.
That fragile dynamic unraveled in the 20th century. The 1916 incorporation of western Sudan under Anglo-Egyptian rule left traditional governance in Darfur largely unchanged. This western region was relatively quiet and increasingly impoverished. The rivalry between Sudan’s Islamic north and the largely non-Islamic south, however, grew more volatile and rekindled civil war in 1983. In 1989, when prospects for a settlement in that conflict were rising, the National Islamic Front staged a military coup against the elected government of Sudan and aborted the peace process. (In late May the two sides signed a peace accord.) In an attempt to consolidate power, the new regime favored “Arab” groups, failed to respect traditional tribal homelands, and denied the people of Darfur a fair share of national resources and political representation.
These policies were a signal to “Arab” groups that their “African” neighbors were fair game. The escalating frequency and ferocity of their attacks eroded centuries-old mechanisms for ameliorating tribal rivalries and spurred the African tribal groups to mount a military response. In February 2003, ethnic and racial hatred exploded into war. Darfur rebels formed the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLA) -- (unrelated to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army of southern Sudan) -- and later the Justice and Equality Movement. They quickly proved formidable military foes, seizing the tactical initiative and a great deal of military equipment from a badly trained and poorly motivated national army.
Unable to defeat a mobile insurgency that knew the land and the people intimately, Khartoum shifted strategy. Instead of fighting a conventional war, it launched the classic counter-insurgency strategy of destroying the civilians who might support the rebels. In addition to its own forces, stretched thin by civil war against the south, Khartoum enlisted a proxy army of “Arab” tribal allies, the Janjawid. It heavily armed these “warriors on horseback,” provided start-up salaries, and told them to take the rest of their pay in booty and in the satisfaction of eliminating their traditional rivals. The government directed many of the attacks and often provided intelligence. Sudanese security services detained and sometimes tortured hundreds of people from the Darfur region, including human rights defenders and lawyers.
And with the only aerial assets in the war, Khartoum launched assaults on the Fur, Massaleit, and Zaghawa using helicopter gunships, MiG jets, and Antonov bombers. These last are retrofitted cargo planes, too inaccurate for most military purposes, but effective in delivering massive anti-personnel bombs packed with screws and nails against large or conspicuous civilian targets.
A British journalist taped a radio exchange in February between a Sudanese ground commander and a pilot overhead:
Commander: We’ve found people still in the village.
Pilot: Are they with us or against us?
Commander: They say they will work with us.
Pilot: They’re liars. Don’t trust them. Get rid of them.
And later, Pilot: Now the village is empty and secure for you. Any village you pass through you must burn. That way, when the villagers come back they’ll have a surprise waiting for them.
"T he scale of the violence is indescribable. In every village they’re talking about hundreds of people killed,” said Coralie Lechelle, an emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who returned in April after four months in Darfur. The months of ground and aerial attacks have wiped out whole villages -- along with houses, foodstuffs, seeds, agricultural implements, and water wells, which the militias are destroying or poisoning with corpses. In the Jabal Si area alone, where 70,000 people once lived in at least 119 villages, there are no civilians left, the U.N. said. With water supplies inadequate to sustain both human and animal life, the sun-baked escape routes and the refugee camps in Chad are strewn with the ghastly sight of animal carcasses. Similar scenes, but on a much larger scale, are to be found throughout Darfur itself.
Increasingly, the government and its Janjawid allies are forcing those who remain in Darfur into what can only be called concentration camps. Housing more than 300,000 internal refugees, these camps allow Khartoum and the militias to control Darfur’s “African” civilians and prevent them from providing food, intelligence, or manpower to the insurgents. International humanitarian groups have some access, but only to the larger camps near such major towns as Nyala, el-Fashir, and Kutum. There, formerly productive people are now completely dependent on international food aid.
Conditions are appalling in these camps, with food, water, and medicine growing ever scarcer. Mariam Bakhid Ahmat was brought with her seven children in an aid convoy to a camp near Iriba. “My children are crying for milk,” she told the New York Times. The onset of seasonal rains in May will render many road corridors impassable and cut off even the currently accessible camps. In the Ardamata camp for displaced people near the town of al-Jeneina, Janjawid are reported to enter openly and choose women to rape, according to Amnesty International.
The more remote concentration camps already face “catastrophic mortality rates” according to MSF, the humanitarian organization that has been most resourceful in responding to the crisis. The U.N. and other aid groups describe a “systematic” denial of humanitarian access, absence of food and water, and rapidly spreading disease, including measles and cholera. Death and disease are decimating the population and serving the murderous ambitions of the Janjawid, who are typically the only authority in the more remote camps.
The international community finally found its voice in speaking of Darfur during grim remembrances of the Rwandan genocide in April. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan declared that he felt “a deep sense of foreboding” at reports of the scale of human rights abuses in Darfur, and that “the international community could not afford to stand idle.”
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, warned this March that “The war in Darfur is more than just a conflict; it is an organized attempt to do away with a group of people.”
To date, the world has taken no action commensurate with these pointed assessments. Rather, as Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell, grimly observed, “1,000 miles north of Rwanda, tens of thousands of Africans are herded onto death marches, and Western leaders are again sitting in offices. How sad it is that it doesn’t even seem strange.”
Never again...again?
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College, has written and testified extensively on Sudan.
This article appeared in Amnesty Magazine,the quarterly magazine of Amnesty International USA. For copies of the original article, the full magazine, subscriptions ($12/yr), or membership to AIUSA including subscription ($25/yr) please: email now@aiusa.org; write to Amnesty Magazine, 322 8th Ave. New York, NY 10001; or call 212.633.4246. Text and photographs are copyright protected.
