Eventually we reached Farchana, one of the dozen or so camps for Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad. Some 20,000 people lived there. Most had fled homes in Darfur when the janjaweed attacks began in 2003. By November 2006, when we showed up, babies who had been born in the camp were now walking, talking, and chasing each other between the neat rows of canvas tents and fences of woven braches. This wasn’t like the makeshift camps inhabited by Afghans who had fled the Taliban, holes scraped out of dirt and covered with plastic and scraps of cloth. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had a field office nearby, though staff there typically vacated the camp by late afternoon, when recruiters for the Sudan Liberation Army moved in, looking for young men, or, failing that, robust children. But after three years, the camp was organized and well run. It had water and latrines, and nobody starved to death.
“I knew the people who attacked us,” Najumi Bashar said, squatting in a patch of shade in the sand outside his tent. It was the first thing he said to me.
“I knew all of them. There had been marriage relations between us. You could say we were friends.”
Bashar belonged to the Masalit tribe, members of which live in western Darfur and eastern Chad. He had once attended university in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, but was back in Darfur raising a family when the war began.
“They came before dawn,” he said. “We were sleeping, and when I woke up the janjaweed, Arabs we knew, were inside the village, riding horses, yelling, burning houses. Sudanese soldiers were outside the village, surrounding us. They were in their vehicles. A couple people were killed. My father was one of them. The rest of us ran away. We left behind our cows and camels. The janjaweed took them.
“We moved to another village nearby where we had relations. They came for us there two days later. They burned the village and others nearby. We moved again. Eventually we crossed the border. Some of us got separated there. My mother and brothers are at another camp. I’m here with my wife and four children. The youngest two were born here. The bigger ones remember that they were born elsewhere, in a good place. They remember that we had gardens.”
A soccer game had erupted among a gang of barefooted children, including Bashar’s. Their ball was made from plastic bags and other scraps of garbage that had been rolled and tied together. “I hope to go back,” he said, “but it’s not likely now.”
All morning and afternoon we heard stories like this. They differed only in details. The raiders usually came at night. People woke up with their houses on fire. Some got out in time. Others burned to death. Camels and cattle were stolen. Women reported that their sons and husbands were murdered, while they were allowed to flee, alive if not unharmed. They worried that their children would forget dead relatives and abandoned homes.
“Our small children don’t remember,” one twenty-four-year-old woman, Halom Ahmed Kharif, said. “We try to explain to them that this is not where we’re supposed to live. We describe the villages we’ve left so that they will hope to go back, too. But it’s already been three years.”
At sixty-seven, Mohammad al-Bakir was one of the elders in the camp. He wore a long white tunic, open at the neck, where a leather pouch containing verses from the Quran hung. Many in the camp, even toddlers, wore the same amulets, which they believed would protect them.
“It wasn’t always like this,” al-Bakir said. “When I was a young man the Arab nomads would stay at our farms with their animals. We would trade. They would give us food, and we would let their camels graze. We’d live together like that. I think the government introduced problems between us and the Arabs. They gave them weapons, and they began stealing our livestock. We went to the government to complain, but they wouldn’t do anything. It got worse. I had a house where my whole family lived. It was burned.”
Few expected their situation to improve or even change. Bashar complained that hundreds of United Nations officials, “the most high people in the world,” had visited the camp and knew what had happened to them, but nothing was ever done about it. The SLA and the JEM were fighting on their behalf in Darfur. But, Bashar said, “they have no political experience.” He didn’t think they could help him get home.
We left the camp and drove farther east to Adré, right on the border with Darfur, to meet with members of the SLA who had been fighting in Sudan. They weren’t hard to find. All it took were well-placed questions at Farchana and other nearby camps. Mohammad, our translator, was proving to be resourceful and more connected than I had realized. And we had introductions from Adam Ali Shogar back in N’Djamena. Besides, the SLA’s presence in eastern Chad was an open secret. We met with several of their fighters in an Adré safehouse. Most nursed recent wounds. Gamar Suliman Adam’s leg had been amputated below the knee. He had been shot up by a helicopter gunship during a battle near El Geneina and carried across the border.
“We’ll never drop our weapons until we get liberation,” another fighter, Anur Mohammad, said. It was as though he felt obligated to begin each conversation with bravado. He soon toned it down. “By liberation, I mean a role in the government.” He picked at his bandages. “And economic development in Darfur. I’d like a job.”
But even in the midst of the SLA’s focus on Darfur, just south of us the war was already expanding into Chad. Villages all along the border were in flames as janjaweed from Sudan joined with local Arab tribes to strike into Chadian territory around Goz Beida. Driving there directly would take us through a war zone. Instead, we backtracked to Abéché and swung south and east from there. The packed dirt road frequently disappeared into swaths of soft sand. We’d push on and hope something resembling a path would re-emerge farther ahead. The landscape was greener than around Abéché and Adré. Trees shaded the road and obscured sightlines. Patches of land all around us had been burned. Ashes, lighter than sand, drifted and swirled like snow. It felt claustrophobic to drive through tunnels of charred and blackened trees. We arrived at a United Nations field office in Goz Beida before dark and pitched tents on the dry dirt inside the compound’s concrete walls.
“If we had guns, we would never be living like this. We would go back and fight them,” Abdullah Abdul Karim told me the following morning. He was middle-aged and wore a white cap over the deeply black skin on his head as he crouched in a small shadow made by a thorn tree near a road leading out of Goz Beida. Around him, squatting or sitting on similar patches of shade, were the members of his family and his village, Bakinya, a Dajo tribe settlement about forty-five kilometres away. The Bakinya villagers had no tents or other shelters, no latrines, and little food or water. Because they were Chadians, displaced within their own country rather than refugees from Darfur, there wasn’t much international aid organizations in the area could do for them. The NGOs had a mandate to help those who had escaped Darfur, but now Darfur had spread to Chad.
As we approached these makeshift camps earlier that morning, I had noticed young teenagers on donkeys roving along the outskirts of the settlement carrying bows and arrows. I glanced up and saw several quivers full of arrows hanging from the thorn trees as well. The arrowheads looked like they had once been iron nails that were then pounded and flattened to tapered tips. I couldn’t resist reaching out to test their sharpness. Karim’s fingers were around my wrist a moment later, pulling me away from the quiver.
“The arrows are poisoned,” he said. “A scratch will kill you.”
Embarrassed and a little shaken, I tried to ask Abdullah how the poison was prepared, but Mohammad Rakit, the sixty-seven-year-old imam of the village, interrupted to scoff at their weapons.
“They have machine guns. We have spears and arrows. What can we possibly do?”
Rakit was in the midst of writing verses from the Quran on wooden tablets. When he filled one tablet with the holy words, they were washed off and the inky water was given to the growing number of sick and injured to drink. With Karim, he explained what had happened to their village.
“At first they would only take our ca
ttle,” he said. “Sudanese Arabs crossed the frontier, and then local Arabs guided them to our villages. We armed ourselves with spears and bows and arrows and tried to get our livestock back. We followed their tracks across the border but couldn’t reach our animals. But now it is worse. It is no longer only about theft. The Arabs have finished killing in Darfur. Now they are starting here.”
Another villager spoke up to stress that his village had once been on good terms with their Arab neighbours. “We married women from their tribes, and they married women from ours. Then Arabs from Sudan came and convinced the Chadian Arabs to kill the blacks.”
“It’s true,” Karim said. “We even used to graze our animals in the same place. But then the Sudanese Arabs would come and taunt us. They’d ask where the slaves kept their cattle, meaning the animals belonging to the black tribes. They’d take these and leave the Arab cattle.”
Several teenaged boys from the village went after the raiders with bows and arrows to retrieve the stolen cattle. One sat near the older men who formed a semi-circle around me, a little farther away, his eyes downcast, and an ugly open wound on his shoulder. He could barely be coaxed to talk. “The animals belonged to us. We went to get them,” he said. Karim explained what was already self-evident. They didn’t get the cattle back. The boy was shot.
Eventually, inevitably, the janjaweed attacks escalated. Two villages close to Bakinya were burned first. Most people fled alive, but some were killed. A woman who returned to one of the destroyed villages to forage for food was captured and forced to work for the janjaweed, hauling water like a pack animal before she was able to escape a week or two later.
Residents of Bakinya figured they’d be next and decided to flee. Rakit stayed behind with some furniture and valuables to wait for other members of his village to return with donkeys. While they were gone, the janjaweed came. Though nearly seventy, he climbed a tree so he could watch as horsemen swept into the village, spraying bullets through the thatched-roofed huts and then torching them. He had thought his village was deserted, but one woman was too frail to run and was burned to death in her home. “We knew the attackers,” he said. “We even knew their names.”
Several days later Donald, Mohammad, and I accompanied displaced residents of Labotega back to their burned village. UN workers heard warning shots from nearby when they visited a week or so earlier, so this time a pickup truck full of Chadian soldiers came with us. One of the villagers, Matar Mohammad, carried a large sword with him as well.
When we arrived, Labotega was still smouldering. Villagers sifted through the ashes, bullet casings, and smashed clay vessels. Perfect circles of mud brick and black ash scarred the ground where thatched huts had once stood. The raiders had even destroyed metal boxes of chalk and school supplies. They broke open urns full of grain and burned their contents. The villagers had fled in such haste that they were unable to gather the chickens that had once pecked freely in and around the village. Now, these same birds scuttled and darted frenetically in and out of the dried stalks of sorghum that flanked Labotega’s smoking ruins.
“There is nothing I can say. I’m so sad,” one of the displaced villagers said, standing in the ash and toppled bricks that had once been his home. “I wanted to see my house again. Maybe there is something for me.” He looked for a sewing machine that one of his wives had hidden but found nothing.
Labotega, a Chadian village attacked and burned by janjaweed. Photo courtesy of Donald Weber.
Matar Mohammad was luckier. He dug through the ash and sandy soil, his massive sword hanging awkwardly over his shoulder in its leather and metal-tipped scabbard. His mother told him she had concealed her valuables under the earth, and soon Mohammad’s fingernails scraped against something metal. He scooped more purposely now at the dirt around the object and lifted into the sunlight. There were two pots, one stacked inside the other, and inside the smaller pot, carefully wrapped in clear plastic, three bars of soap. He looked pleased.
“Salam alaikum.” Peace be with you.
“Alaikum salam.” And also with you.
“How are you?”
“Well. Hamdullah.” Thanks to God.
“And you?”
“I’m fine. Hamdullah.”
“And your family?”
“They are well. Hamdullah.”
“Yours?”
“Good. Hamdullah.”
Mohammad, our translator, was making introductions to a man of about thirty-five wearing a long white tunic and a tight-fitting, brimless kufi cap in the sandy yard outside Goz Beida’s hospital. Around him, sitting under whatever shade they could find, or cooking over small gas stoves, were the less-seriously wounded victims of janjaweed attacks or their family members. The really badly hurt were inside, where there was not nearly enough room for everyone who needed care.
Every time Mohammad met someone new, the initial conversations were identical. There were the ritual greetings, inquiries about family, thanks to God. Then Mohammad would reveal the family and tribe, originally from Darfur, to which he belonged. A connection and trust would be established, and we could begin a real discussion. In this case, the man with the kufi cap was Adam Daoud Gammar, a member of the Dajo tribe who lived in the village of Miramanege, near the border with Sudan. His village and tribe were black, as were many of the nearby settlements. Arab tribes lived among them or passed through, grazing their animals. If relations were not harmonious, they were at least stable, Arabs and blacks trading with each other. This stopped in 2003 when outright war erupted in Darfur.
“In the beginning, the Arabs didn’t kill us unless we fought back. They only took our cattle,” Gammar said. “Men from my village and others formed groups to protect ourselves and retrieve our cows. Twice, we followed our stolen animals into Sudan. Another time we attacked the Arab raiders. There were fifty-seven of us Dajo. We killed six Arabs with our bows and spears. They had cloaked their faces, but when we uncovered them, we recognized who they were. They were well known. They lived with us.”
Revenge came during Ramadan, a few weeks before we met. Arab raiders attacked Gammar’s village. Some forty horsemen rode into Miramanege, while others surrounded it. “First they killed or captured those of us in the village, then they went after us in the fields, chasing down fleeing villagers on horseback.” Gammar said. When it was over, seven were dead and twenty-one, including Adam, captured.
“They tied our hands behind our backs and led us to a nearby Arab village, pulling us by the ropes that bound us together. They began hauling away groups of five, but not so far that the rest of us couldn’t watch. The Arabs shot them one by one. If the gun jammed, or if the bullet didn’t kill the victim right away, they took sticks, stones, anything at all, and they beat them until they were dead.”
Gammar watched ten of his fellow villagers murdered this way. All the while he tugged and strained against the ropes binding his wrists and finally loosened his bonds. When his captors came to take Gammar and those bound to him to their deaths, he slipped free and bolted. The horsemen charged after him but could not manoeuvre quickly around the thatched huts. Gammar zigged and zagged. The men on horseback shouted and wheeled their animals in tight circles. Gammar heard shots as he cleared the village. He plunged into a field of sorghum and ran, disappearing among the tall dry stalks that reached well over his head and hid him from his pursuers.
Gammar came back later that evening with local police. They quickly found fifteen bodies, and for a more a moment Gammar allowed himself to hope that the final five had somehow escaped as well. Then they saw thick tracks through the sand where something heavy had been dragged. The janjaweed had put ropes around the necks of the final five Dajo and dragged them behind their horses until they died. When Gammar found their bodies, some were missing their heads. Janjaweed, hiding behind cover some distance away, shot at him and the police as they tried to bury the dead. The police shot back, surprising the janjaweed, who were expecting only more black tribesmen with spears. The ja
njaweed ran away.
Gammar moved to the village of Koloy, where some 5,000 Dajo and members of other black tribes had gathered for protection. Janjaweed marauded through the desert outside the village. There was a water pump nearby. Women sent there to fetch water were often raped. But at least in Koloy Gammar was reunited with his uncle, Abdullah Idriss, who had fled his own village of Modoyna, which had also been attacked and burned. Idriss rode a donkey back to the village a few days after Gammar arrived to see if he could recover anything from the smoking ruins. While he was gone, janjaweed on horseback and camels attacked Koloy. Many of those living there saw them coming and ran or hid, but Idriss, away for the day, didn’t know what had happened. The janjaweed saw Idriss before he saw them and charged after him on horseback. Idriss jumped off his donkey and ran. The janjaweed opened fire. Gammar, hidden nearby, watched everything.
“None of the bullets hit him,” he said. “It was because of the holy amulet he was wearing. So they chased him down on their horses, running over him and knocking him to the ground. Six men leaped on top of him. One held down each arm and leg. Another held his face to the sky to force him to watch. But when one of the janjaweed pointed his gun at my uncle and pulled the trigger, nothing happened. His amulet was still protecting him. Abdullah knew the men who held him down. Two were from black tribes that had joined with the Arabs. Abdullah called to them by name, begging them to stop. But the man with the rifle removed its bayonet. He kneeled on my uncle’s chest and used the knife to dig out both of his eyes.”
Is This Your First War? Page 15