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Peace Under Fire: Sudan's Darfur Crisis

[Sudan] An elderly Sudanese refugee from Darfur in eastern Chad UNHCR/B.Heger

In August 1955 the Equatoria Corps of the Sudanese Army mutinied, sparking civil war. Barring a fragile peace that lasted just 11 years war has raged ever since.

More than two million people have lost their lives. Over four million people are internally displaced. Half a million more live as refugees in neighbouring countries.

And now just as the government of Sudan and Southern rebels appear close to signing a Comprehensive peace deal, a vicious civil conflict Has broken out in the western province of Darfur.

Just inside the Chadian border, Sudanese refugees struggle to return a semblance of normality to their shattered lives.

Lives that were traumatised by war which must now be rebuilt in the unfamiliar surroundings of a foreign land.

These people are just a few of the victims of the Darfur crisis – a conflict whose roots lie in the culture of war and impunity that has plagued Sudan for decades.

Worried that the peace process between the government and southern based rebels would leave their province isolated and undeveloped, and deny them a share of the country’s new found oil wealth, two rebel groups sprung up in Darfur in early 2003.

Pro-government militias charged with combating the rebels, then launched a retaliatory campaign of murder and forced displacement which has left thousands dead and as many as a million homeless.

Across Darfur entire villages and towns now stand empty, while scores of villages have been destroyed by the militias, or the Janjaweed, as they have become collectively known.

Houses have been burnt, livestock stolen and children abducted in a scorched earth policy that has sparked a mass exodus of people.

One hundred and ten thousand are thought to have reached neighbouring Chad but the vast majority are now displaced within Sudan.

Most of them have sought shelter in dozens of displacement camps scattered throughout Darfur.

A recently signed ceasefire between the government and Darfur rebel groups does offer hope that the worst of the conflict may yet be over, but aid workers remain fearful.

And with humanitarian agencies operating with only limited access to these sites, the displaced are having to fend largely for themselves in what the international aid community now regards as a major crisis of protection.

Here the displaced remain at the mercy of the Janjaweed, condemned to a continued atmosphere of fear and attack.

In response, many young men have left their families to join the rebels in a fight that is rapidly being characterized as an ethnic conflict.

Rebel leaders claim that the government continues to arm and command the Janjaweed, in an attempt to drive the non-Arab tribes off the land.

Bahar el Din is one of the leaders of the Justice and Equality rebel movement – he’s adamant that the conflict is motivated by a racial agenda.

“The government is using Arabs to get rid of the black people, the real Africans. So they are not fighting in one place – they are fighting were there is black Africans.

Now, from Tine up to Holbaranga there is no black person in his place – they all fled to Chad.”

Refugees are now scattered along the length of Chad’s border with Darfur trying to come to terms with the trauma that has befallen them. And although they come from villages and town that are often hundreds of kilometers apart, they all tell the same story.

Faiza Hussein says that she will never forget the day the war came to her village.

“They burned our houses and took our money and killed our children and our brothers using aeroplanes and armed vehicles. The Janjaweed came on horses and the government soldiers in vehicles.

For one month we were running on foot until thanks to God we reached Chad where we were welcomed and given food and water.”

Ahmed Abbas says that dozens of people were killed when the Janajweed attacked his village proving, he says, that the campaign of violence being waged in Darfur is nothing less than a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

“Every man aged above 15 is killed and the stomach of every pregnant woman is cut open in case she is carrying a boy.

Sudan has become a country for Arabs only and there is no room for the black people.

The government wants to kill the blacks and replace them with the Arabs because our land is good for cultivation.”

In the capital Khartoum, meanwhile, governments officials blame armed robbers for the conflict and categorically reject accusations that the government is working with the militias to prosecute an ethnic agenda in Darfur.

Dr. Abdelrahman Abu Doum, the Deputy minister for humanitarian affairs recalls a recent reconciliation conference between different ethnic groups from Darfur.

“The representative of the Fur tribe was a fair skinned person while the representative of the Arabs was black – so who is who? It’s all invented.

Count for yourself the number of Darfurians who are holding very senior positions in this government.

One of the leaders of the Darfur rebellion was one of the leaders of a the government militia fighting the rebels in the south. Was he, as an African, trying to kill the Africans in the south? Unbelievable.”

But whoever is to blame for the conflict, the humanitarian consequences of the war threaten to worsen by the day.

The Medecins sans Frontieres hospital at Tine on the Chad Sudan border is still choked with victims of the last round of heavy fighting.

Doctor Louis Kakudji is deeply shocked by what he’s seen here.

“The situation here at Tine following the events in Darfur is very dramatic. The population has been totally abandoned – here you find severe atrocities happening – nobody should close their eyes to what is taking place. The people have been totally abandoned and have no solutions to their problems.

For example over here we have a child who stepped on a mine. And this child has an abcess.

Here we are entering a tent with people wounded in the fighting. In most cases these people are victims of the Darfur conflict - victims of bombings and outbreaks of fighting.

We have here some amputees - people who arrived with limbs damaged beyond repair. So we were obliged to amputate because there was very little left of his foot or leg.”

Outside the MSF hospital on the outskirts of Tine refugees huddle against the driving desert wind.

But perhaps the greatest danger they face, now stranded in an environment drier than the one they fled, is the desperate shortage of water. Those animals that survived the bombing raids, the Janjaweed attacks and the long trek across the desert are now dying of thirst.

And there are those amongst the international aid community who worry that the people will be next.

Yvan Sturm, is the UNHCRs senior emergency officer in Chad.

“I would say that the most difficult question is the water situation - as you can see on the map we are really at the edge between the Sahel and the Sahara which is dry definitely dry and its difficult to find water.

For the time being for example we are digging wells - we already dig some 9 wells – we are drilling – I think that we have 5 bore holes but not all of them have water – that means on average the technical people tell us that 25-30 % positive results when digging the bore holes.

This race against time I would say is not only to relocate the people but to relocate the people where water can be found and where water is available for them.

The situation is more than serious based on the fact that we have to move these people from the border as soon as possible in 3 months the rainy season will start and in that case if we cannot access these people they will be stuck for 3-4 months with no assistance.”

With the rains due in June UNHCR is now trying to move all the refugees away from the border before the roads become impassable.

From these makeshift border camps, refugees are transferred to purpose built camps like this one at Farchana, where refugees have now started digging in for the long haul.

But many thousands remain in the border camps, and with little else to do, small groups of men gather under a tree and talk of home. Invariably, their thoughts turn to family members and the countless others still stranded on the other side of the border.

Babikir Ibrahim lost contact with his wife and father as they fled their village and three months later he is yet to find them.

“They are hiding on the mountain and they don’t have food or water and the Janjaweed are still attacking them and raping the women, and taking the children into slavery to herd the animals which they had already stolen.”

Meanwhile, in the Kenyan resort town of Naivasha, Sudanese government officials and southern rebel leaders stand on the cusp of a historic peace deal.

After years of negotiation there is now real hope that the decades old civil war between north and south is finally coming to an end.

But even if these arch-protagonists do manage to shake hands on a final peace deal, so long as there is no peace in Darfur, Sudan will remain a country at war, a country in turmoil.

A country whose people seem forever on the run.


This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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