Is This Your First War?

by Michael Petrou

  In the summer of 2005, riots and protests swept through the Kurdish regions of northwest Iran after security forces shot Kurdish activist Shwane Ghaderi, dragged him through the streets, and then tortured him to death. At least twenty more people died in the uprising, including when the government deployed helicopter gunships against protesters who had attacked a military outpost. If this had happened in Jenin, in the Palestinian West Bank, it would have been front-page news everywhere. But since the dead were Iranian Kurds, it wasn’t. An Iranian friend, in exile in London, described the events as a Kurdish intifada and lamented, “If only it had half the media coverage as the Palestinian one.”

  Other times our attention and affections shift, depending on global politics. Prior to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and his subsequent expulsion by an American-led military coalition, many on the left, especially in Britain, threw their support behind Iraqi trade unionists and socialist opponents of the dictator. After the war, when Saddam became an enemy of America, Western leftists abandoned their Iraqi comrades, whose struggle was now championed by the conservative hawks who had previously shunned them. The Taliban in Afghanistan were the same brutes before September 11, 2001, but it wasn’t until after the terrorist attacks on America that Western politicians and journalists had much to say about Afghans living under their regime.

  In 2006, the African tribes of eastern Chad suffered from the multiple disadvantages of being black, far away, home to no one who plotted violence against Western capitals, and living on land that barely held water, let alone oil. They experienced terror but didn’t export it. They were easy to ignore. Yet when the race-based ethnic cleansing that had swept the Darfur region of Sudan washed over their borders, they died just as dead as did Bosnian Muslims the previous decade, or the Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis that same year. The only difference is nobody cared.

  Darfur’s slow-motion genocide has long and twisted roots, but many lead back to the unlikely source of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the megalomaniacal and likely unhinged former dictator of Libya. In the 1960s and 70s, a racist ideology of Arab supremacism took hold in North Africa, and Gaddafi become its primary advocate. He dreamed of an “Arab belt” that would span the Sahel, that arid swath of land that stretches across Africa south of the Sahara, and eventually grow into a united Sahelian empire. To this end he founded an “Islamic Legion” and set up training camps in the Libyan desert that attracted Arabs from all over Africa. He also armed and funded various Arab and Islamist movements. Gaddafi never achieved his grandiose plans and moved on to champion other causes. But the Arab supremacism he supported found fertile ground in Sudan.

  In the 1980s an organization calling itself the Tajamu al Arabi, or the Arab Gathering, emerged in Darfur, a sprawling expanse of land about the size of France that is inhabited by both Arab and black, or “African” tribes. The former tend to be nomadic herders, while the latter are more often sedentary pastoralists. Distinctions between black and Arab are blurry, however, and are often based as much on a tribe’s culture and the lifestyle of its members as on their ethnicity. And while tensions between Arab and black tribes always existed, so did intermarriage and other harmonious interactions. The Arab Gathering disturbed this uneasy peace with propaganda claiming that the “slaves” had ruled Darfur long enough. Violent attacks on non-Arabs soon followed.

  Environmental factors intensified the simmering dispute. As the Sahara Desert expanded southward, there was less arable and grazing land available. Competition over diminishing resources added to ethnic hatred. Herders and farmers have opposed each other in the Sahel for centuries, but access to modern weapons made these conflicts deadlier. Finally, religious bigotry played its role. While almost everyone in Darfur is Muslim, God is said to have revealed the Quran to the prophet Mohammad in the Arabic language. For Arab supremacists, this is proof of their religious as well as racial superiority.

  The conflict escalated in early 2003, when rebels from the Sudan Liberation Army, consisting of fighters from black tribes in Darfur, attacked the airport in El Fasher, North Darfur. The Sudanese government responded by recruiting members of Arab tribes into militias known as janjaweed. Together they unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing on the black tribes of Darfur, killing at least 200,000 and displacing another two million — hundreds of thousands of whom fled to Chad, where many are still housed in refugee camps the size of small towns. Sudanese army and janjaweed attacks on civilian populations might have been crudely justified by the support given by black villagers to the SLA and other Sudanese rebel groups, such as the Justice and Equality Movement. But janjaweed leader Musa Hilal was more honest and explicit in an August 2004 directive issued from his headquarters: “Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.” Tellingly, Hilal described his campaign of rape, murder, and arson against fellow Muslims as “jihad.”

  Chad, the eastern region of which abuts Darfur, was never immune to the violence next door. The frontier that separates the two countries is mostly unguarded and essentially meaningless for those who live and die there. The same tribes and ethnic groups straddle the border and are connected by family and commerce. The same divisions between Arabs and blacks, farmers and nomads, define eastern Chad as much as they do Darfur. Both presidents Idriss Déby of Chad and Omar al-Bashir of Sudan exploited these divisions to pursue their own political and military goals. Darfur rebel groups found shelter in Chad, where Déby recognized their usefulness as proxy militias to pressure Sudan. Al-Bashir armed and funded Chadian rebel groups for the same reason. The janjaweed his government recruited included from the start Chadian Arabs in its ranks.

  Sudanese janjaweed began openly ranging across the border to attack and burn Chadian villages in 2005. The violence followed a familiar pattern. A settlement inhabited by a black tribe would be ransacked, its occupants raped and murdered, while an Arab village only a few kilometres away was left untouched. The Sudanese janjaweed were joined by Chadian Arabs, who formed what can be accurately described as Chadian janjaweed. Occasionally, complex tribal and personal rivalries, as well as fear and self-preservation, meant that black tribes aligned with the raiding Arab fighters against other black tribes and villages. Some Arab tribes also suffered at the hands of their black neighbours. But the violence was largely one-sided, directed overwhelmingly against blacks. The janjaweed were armed with assault rifles and other modern weapons provided by the government of Sudan, whose bombers also attacked across the border. The black tribal fighters had spears and poison-tipped arrows.

  Dozens of Chadian villages were burned, their occupants murdered or driven out, in the spring of 2006. The rainy season, which makes travel in the Sahel difficult, brought a respite. No one expected it would last. The janjaweed came back in the fall. They murdered hundreds and drove thousands more from their homes before the year was up. I had by now been hired as a full-time correspondent for Maclean’s. I arrived in Chad in November, along with photographer Donald Weber, as the janjaweed were renewing their onslaught.

  The dog looked as if it might have been some sort of terrier. It had shaggy grey hair falling off its muzzle that gave it the appearance of an elderly man as it stood in a vacant, garbage-strewn lot beside the road. Donald and I were crawling through traffic in a taxi with Mubarak, a local guide and translator I had hired on the recommendation of Omer, a contact in Boston who had emigrated from Darfur years earlier. Mubarak’s friends usually called him Mohammad, and soon so did we. He was understated, confident, and relaxed. He had a way — common among the best fixers — of convincing you that all problems can be solved. I liked him immediately. We were spending a couple of days in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, establishing relations with some senior members of the Sudan Liberation Army who were based in the city and sorting out the logistics of our travel to Chad’s border region with Darfur, some 700 kilometres away.

  The dog faced a small group of shirtless boys, maybe nine or ten years old, who circled it, laughing, about three
or four metres away. Its back was to a corner formed by the twisted remnant of a broken fence. It took me a few moments to realize what was happening as we rolled past, and I caught glimpses from between other cars and holes in the fence. Then I noticed that the dog’s jaw hung broken from its skull, slack and bloody.

  A boy took a few steps forward and hurled a rock. It missed. The dog lurched backwards and to the side, but it was trapped with nowhere to go. A second boy was already throwing another rock or piece of broken concrete. This one connected. The dog yelped and cowered, ears flattened and tail curled between its legs.

  “What are they doing?” Donald asked, though I suppose what he meant was “why are they doing it?”

  “They’re playing,” said Mohammad.

  Our taxi rounded the corner. The dog and the boys disappeared from view.

  The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in N’Djamena was a busy, cluttered affair. The agency had been overseeing camps in eastern Chad that had housed and fed hundreds of thousands of refugees from Darfur for several years, and now the disintegrating security situation in Chad itself was complicating relief efforts as villages along the border emptied and burned. Officials in the office sat at desks covered with stacks of paper, old desktop computers, and electrical fans that whirred and clicked at top speed as they panned back and forth across the room. The heat clung to our skin, even indoors. Most of the staff seemed to have come from French-speaking countries in Africa and Europe. I had been in touch weeks earlier to let them know we’d be coming and were hoping to hitch a ride with them to the border region.

  After a few minutes, a woman I had last spoken to from Canada ushered us into her office. She spread a map on her desk and beckoned us to examine it. It was colour-coded to indicate which parts of the country were safe to travel through.

  “We can get you on a World Food Program Flight to Abéché tomorrow,” she said in accented English. “That’s the largest population centre in the east and is a hub for a lot of our activities there. If you want to go farther east, you’re on your own. The road to Adré should be safe during the day, though I wouldn’t stray from the main path or stop anywhere for too long.”

  She traced a finger south from Adré to where a cluster of refugee camps was located near the town of Goz Beida.

  “This is where a lot of the recent violence has been happening. Many Chadians from closer to the border have fled to Goz Beida for safety. They’re not in proper camps and aren’t being fed or protected. They’re just gathering for safety in numbers. But villages are being attacked deeper and deeper into Chadian territory. Some of our staff visited a recently burned village here” — she pointed at a spot on the map about ten kilometres south of Goz Beida — “and were shot at. You can get there from Abéché with a good vehicle. It’s risky. We only fly.”

  A week or two earlier, there had been a major battle between the rebel Sudan Liberation Army and the Sudanese army just across the border from the town of Bahai in Chad’s remote northeastern desert, far from either Adré or Goz Beida. I knew the nearby Oure Cassoni refugee camp was thoroughly infiltrated by the SLA and the Justice and Equality Movement, another rebel militia. I had made tenuous contacts with people affiliated with both groups. There was next to no Chadian government or army presence there, and if we were to illegally cross into Darfur, this was the place to do it.

  “You can’t drive there,” the UNHCR official said when I asked about Bahai. “It’s desert, unreliable roads, and lots of bandits. Check in with our office in Abéché. We might be able to fly you in.”

  She held up the colour-coded map with its broad warning swaths of red and orange everywhere we hoped to travel.

  “Do you want copies of these?”

  “Sure.”

  Before I left Canada, Omer, my Sudanese contact in Boston, had given me the satellite phone number of Adam Ali Shogar, a political leader with the Sudan Liberation Army. Shogar had been involved with Darfur opposition groups in Chad since the early 1990s. He was based in N’Djamena when we arrived in the capital. I reached him around noon, and he invited us to come over that evening. We had some time to kill and spent it in the city.

  N’Djamena is typical of places in the developing world that are home to large numbers of diplomats and international aid workers. Almost everyone there lives in crushing poverty. Roads are not paved. Buildings are single-storey. It smells of garbage and sewage, and both types of filth fill drainage ditches beside the road. But there are isolated bubbles of comparatively obscene wealth. There’s a mosque — pristine, architecturally beautiful, several storeys high. Saudi money pays for it, and it’s a safe bet that the brand of Islam promoted there isn’t of the moderate and mystical Sufi variety that has deep roots in Chad. There are a handful of hotels — gated and guarded. No one from N’Djamena can afford to stay there. But journalists and aid workers need a place to sleep and swim. They also need somewhere to eat, so there are a few expensive restaurants. Outside these establishments on any given night are parked rows of white Land Rovers and other SUVs, which seem to be the only vehicles anyone from the United Nations will drive. French cuisine is popular. I accidentally ordered a plate of lamb’s brains sautéed in butter and garlic in one restaurant when I failed to recognize the French word for brain on the menu. Mohammad eyed the listed prices and wouldn’t order a thing until I made it clear he didn’t have to pay. He was the only black man in the place other than the waitstaff.

  We left all this behind and drove to the outskirts of the city to find Shogar’s house. When we got there he was sitting on a white plastic chair on the roof. A handful of SLA fighters who had been injured in Darfur were there, playing cards, their heads wrapped in white turbans with long tails of cloth draped over the their shoulders. They paused and kneeled, touching their foreheads to the floor when the evening call to prayer sounded by a muezzin in a nearby mosque floated over the city, every syllable stretched and musical. Allah Akbar. God is great.

  Shogar had several satellite phones set up on a flimsy table on the roof. These phones only work when there’s an unobstructed path through space between the phone and an orbiting satellite. During the day, his fighters in Darfur sped around the desert in Toyota pickup trucks, phones stashed in pockets or glove compartments. It was impossible to reach them then. But at night SLA guerrillas made camp and the wind died down, allowing signal-blurring dust and sand to settle, and Shogar got up on his roof. All evening he was on his phones, receiving reports, giving instructions. He talked to me between calls. He spoke quietly and evenly, but with the same staged confidence of military men speaking to outsiders everywhere. It was impossible to gauge his sincerity. “Of course we’ll defeat them — the government, the janjaweed forces, all of them. It’s a matter of time.”

  Shogar said he wanted accommodation with his enemies and didn’t indulge in talk of ethnic nationalism or revenge. “We’re fighting to be equal, to be part of Sudan. Those who rule treat us like third-class citizens.”

  “Who do you mean by us?” I asked.

  “Darfur. I mean all of Darfur. Even Arabs who are fighting us in the janjaweed, they’re also marginalized. The government has manipulated them to fight us because they’re ignorant and uneducated. We’re trying to bring these fighters to our side. We’re trying to recruit anyone who believes in the unity of all Darfurians.”

  “How’s that going?” I asked.

  He barely paused to breathe before answering. “Oh, very well. We’re making a lot of progress.”

  “Really?”

  “Truly.”

  Shogar said a column of SLA fighters was active close to the Chadian border near Bahai. I had mixed feelings about sneaking into Darfur with the SLA. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had shut down access to Darfur for Western journalists. The only way to get there was by sneaking in through Chad. But factions of the SLA and the other prominent Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, were periodically switching sides or turning again
st each other, increasing the risk of being double-crossed and kidnapped. It had happened to another journalist shortly before we got there. Still, it was tempting. We asked Shogar for the SLA commander’s satellite phone numbers. Shogar called him up from the roof.

  “Salam alaikum. Peace be with you. I’m fine. Hamdullah. Thanks to God. There are a couple of Canadian journalists with me. They’re heading east and may cross the border. They’ll be in touch. Look after them.”

  The next morning we flew to Abéché with the World Food Program. The sky beneath the twin-propeller plane was cloudless and clear of dust, revealing miles upon miles of desert and scrub on the ground below. Abéché from the air was a sprawl of flat-roofed buildings surrounded by mud walls and the odd tree. The pilot circled the runway outside town once to look for stray animals that might have wandered onto the landing strip and then quickly brought the plane down. We spent the afternoon renting a large white 4x4 and filling its trunk with jugs of water and gasoline. We also hired a local driver — Ahmed, a teenager who Mohammad confided might have been mentally unwell. He grinned a lot and spoke in bursts of garbled French I couldn’t understand.

  After crashing for a night in Abéché’s United Nations compound, we drove out of town early in the morning. The road was packed dirt with paths that split off and rejoined the main route when deep ruts or other obstructions made moving straight ahead impossible. While the landscape looked barren and featureless from the air, on the ground it undulated, with tiny villages, goats, and the odd camel appearing and disappearing on the horizon. We passed trucks overflowing with armed men, some in uniform, some not. It was difficult to know exactly who they were. We were also stopped at a couple of checkpoints, where I began to suspect Mohammad wasn’t forthright in explaining that we were journalists rather than aid workers. A camel carcass lay beside the road. Vultures, like enormous flies, walked over it, pecking at its empty eye sockets.