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Sudan's caldron of death

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Knight Ridder Newspapers

SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Some villagers return to their home near Kailek, Sudan, to scavenge for firewood and other items that can be sold to survive. The Arab Janjaweed have ravaged the area in Darfur province, Sudan, in what some human-rights groups call "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" of the black African farmers. The government denies atrocities have occurred.

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"They killed even babies," said Rahman, 40, a thin, bearded survivor with sad, glassy eyes that reflected his loss.

In the furnace of Sudan, an ethnic and political war is burning through the sandy, barren province of Darfur, mostly killing the helpless. It ignores cease-fires and international condemnation while tossing its survivors into an abyss.

Its roots lie in a long-standing rivalry between nomadic Arab herdsmen and settled black African farmers amid a government policy of "Arabization" in a province where many inhabitants are black. At least 10,000 have died and perhaps 1 million have been chased from their straw huts to as far as neighboring Chad. Andrew Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, warned Thursday in Geneva that up to 1 million may die if aid does not reach them soon.

Government officials blame the violence on a rebel movement that took up arms 15 months ago seeking economic development for Darfur and a share of political power. The officials deny reports of atrocities.

"There is no ethnic cleansing. There is no genocide," Eltigani Salih Fediel, Sudan's deputy foreign minister, said in an interview last week in the capital, Khartoum.

Sudan Geography Largest country in Africa; dominated by the Nile and its tributaries. History • Military regimes favoring Islamic-oriented governments have dominated national politics since independence from Britain in 1956. Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war for all but 10 years of this period (1972-82). The wars are rooted in northern economic, political and social domination of non-Muslim, non-Arab southern Sudanese. • Since 1983, the war and war- and famine-related effects have led to more than 2 million deaths and more than 4 million people being displaced. • The ruling regime is a mixture of military elite and an Islamist party that came to power in a 1989 coup. Some northern opposition parties have made common cause with the southern rebels and entered the war as a part of an anti-government alliance. • Peace talks gained momentum in 2002-03 with the signing of several accords, including a cease-fire agreement. Source: CIA

But United Nations officials and human-rights groups are using terms such as "ethnic cleansing," "genocide" and "war crimes" to describe what's unfolding.

A U.N. report on conditions in the village of Kailek accuses local government officials of ordering "a policy of forced starvation" and says the government "deliberately deceived the United Nations" by insisting the villagers faced no hardships after the government's anti-rebel sweep.

Kailek isn't the only place to have suffered in Darfur. But the story, told by its former residents during a reporter's rare government-sanctioned trip to the region last week, is one of a murderous rampage by government-

sponsored Arab militias, followed by two months of torture, starvation and systematic rape.

Village taken hostage

At the heart of the tale is the role of the militias, called Janjaweed: "the men on horses." Across Darfur, they have unleashed their fury on black African tribes linked with rebels, namely the Zaghawa, Fur and Masalit.

According to survivors, hundreds of Janjaweed arrived in the Kailek area in early February, wielding swords and guns. They galloped from village to village, slaughtering hundreds of black Africans, all Muslims like themselves. Truckloads of government soldiers in camouflage fatigues reportedly helped them.

They razed houses, crushed mosques and tore up hundreds of copies of the Quran, Islam's holy book. They whipped women and children.

Then they surrounded Kailek and took everyone hostage.

"It was a concentration camp," said a U.N. official who visited the area in late April and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were eating, sleeping and dying in their own feces because they weren't allowed to go out."

There was a method to the violence. Arabs were left alone, survivors said. Some even joined the Janjaweed to prey on their neighbors.

"They asked us if we were Fur," said Adam Muhammed, 58, a gray-bearded farmer with a thick neck, referring to an African tribe. "If you said 'yes,' they shot you."

His neck and some divine intervention, he said, helped him that day. As he was about to receive a bullet, the gun jammed. So the horsemen hanged him from a tree. The branch broke. He fell to the ground and pretended he was dead.

"God did not want to complete my days on Earth," he said, turning to reveal the long scar where the noose bit into his neck.

Betrayal — and bloodshed

Sumia Rahman, 16, and her brother Anwar, 10, fled toward the nearby mountains after they saw their two younger brothers killed.

But their stepmother, Fatima, was caught. She was taken, along with dozens of other women, to the woods nearby and whipped with sticks. Then they ripped off her clothes and gang-raped her.

"They called me 'abid' — slave," said Fatima, 30, her eyes turning away. "If I was an Arab, they would not have raped me."

Meanwhile, her husband, Hamid, and several hundred men fled into the mountains. His leg was bleeding from a sword wound. As he climbed, he heard explosions in the distance. Planes, he realized, were dropping bombs.

Ten days later, the Janjaweed sent representatives to urge them to return to Kailek. They brought along a Fur elder to vouch for their sincerity.

	Only traces of life — such as broken pots and pans — and animals remain in the village of Kailek. The Arab Janjaweed, who arrived in the area in February, slaughtered and raped many of Kailek's people, burning the village before moving on.

"The situation is safe. You can come back," Hamid recalled them saying.

Without food or medicines, they had no other option. Soldiers, he said, escorted them down the mountain. But again, they were betrayed. In Kailek, they were placed under house arrest, along with about 1,700 other villagers.

That's when Hamid learned his two boys were dead.

But what happened in the next two months in Kailek brought new meaning to the bloodletting.

A few were able to bribe the Janjaweed to leave Kailek, but most villagers were too poor. Some were shot in the arms or legs to prevent them from fleeing.

Soon, the Janjaweed began to execute one or two of the strongest men every day, survivors said. Children died of hunger and thirst, while scores of women endured a living death.

"In the night, the Janjaweed would go into houses and select ladies and take them away to be raped," village elder Adam Muhammed Adam — who shares a similar name with Adam Muhammed the farmer — recounted as scores of villagers around him nodded their heads solemnly. He had a list of 76 rape victims, he said.

The world takes notice

In early April, aid workers from the Atlanta-based aid agency CARE received authorization to visit Kailek. They found the plight of the villagers so terrifying that they issued a report and passed it to other relief agencies.

U.N. officials pressed the government to allow it to visit Kailek, but it refused to issue the necessary permits. Government officials insisted that the conditions weren't life-threatening and that villagers were free to leave Kailek at any time.

On April 25, U.N. officials and Western aid workers were allowed to visit. They, too, issued a report, only more scathing.

The U.N. report concluded that the Janjaweed were indistinguishable from the police and had imprisoned the villagers. It found that eight to nine children younger than 5 were dying every day from malnutrition.

The United Nations also said local security forces were ordered "to prohibit, by any means necessary, any civilian movement out of Kailek." In interviews, survivors made similar claims.

Zayat Ahmed Zayat, the regional security chief who oversees Kailek, denied the accusations, saying soldiers and police were sent to protect the villagers from rebels. The government denied any Janjaweed were involved or that it controls them and described them as bandits.

A few days after the report was issued, trucks transferred the villagers from Kailek to a refugee camp Kas, about 40 miles north.

"No reconciliation"

No one lives in Kailek today. Mud huts, their straw roofs gone, are empty. The red earth is scattered with pieces of women's clothing, broken pots and pans and slippers. A few charred trees remain.

The only residents are stray dogs and limping donkeys that have taken over the homes of their former masters.

Around Kailek, village after village has been burned down, making a homecoming impossible. Arab nomads and herders and gangs of roving Janjaweed share the landscape with cattle and camels.

All the black Africans are gone, except for a few who collect burned wood to sell in Kas.

There, the survivors of Kailek stare at death each day. The Janjaweed are around. In the past month, men have been slain when they left the camp. Women have been raped while they fetch firewood. Now, some mothers send their frightened children to do the job, aid workers said.

"I don't feel safe here," said Sumia Rahman.

But she's too scared to return home, as the government is urging. "Arabs killed our people. We don't want to go back," she said.

The wounds are so deep, so collective, that the rift between Arabs and non-Arabs may never heal in Darfur. Diplomats and analysts fear it could open the lid of a Pandora's box of tribal tensions that could gut Sudan's long quest for peace.

When some men from Kailek were asked last week if they lost any children, a melancholy chorus piped up: "three children," "two children," "one child," "three children."

"What's left in the heart of the person who has raped a man's daughter, his wife, and killed his brother?" asked Adam Muhammed Adam, the village elder. "There will be no reconciliation."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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