Is This Your First War?

by Michael Petrou

  Gammar took us into the hospital to see his uncle. The rooms and hallways were crowded but swept and mopped. Men lay on cots, metal bedpans on the floor nearby. Relatives, mostly women, held the ends of the long, brightly coloured lengths of cloth in which they wrapped their bodies and waved them back and forth above the faces of their sick and wounded loved ones, stirring the air and keeping away flies. We found Abdullah Idriss on his cot beneath a mosquito net. His wife, Mariam, sat at the foot of the bed, along with their two children, Bushra, five, and Yasin, two. Idriss said little. His wife said nothing. She looked overcome with despair, traumatized and in shock. It was difficult to imagine how Idriss might support her and their two young children. Their futures were not promising before the attack and now must have loomed before her as something so bleak as to be overwhelming. When Abdullah Idriss’s mother heard what had happened to him, she too needed to be hospitalized.

  “Before all this, Abdullah was happy and lived a normal life,” his nephew, Adam Daoud Gammar, said. “He had cows, and he had good relations with everybody. Maybe now he would be better off dead.”

  Throughout our time in the southeast of Chad, Mohammad had been in touch with SLA commanders fighting inside Darfur. They were on the move, travelling long distances, but were most active hundreds of kilometres to the north, across the border from Bahai and the Oure Cassoni refugee camp. There was space on a World Food Program flight that could take us there by way of Abéché. We broke down our tents, rolled up our sleeping bags, and stuffed everything into backpacks and duffle bags. There wasn’t much to carry. Weight restrictions on UN flights meant that none of us had more than fifteen kilograms of gear, including laptops, satellite phones, and cameras. Our driver would take our vehicle back to Abéché himself and leave it there. We’d find other transportation in Bahai. It was too far and too dangerous to ask him to drive there.

  We arrived in Abéché late morning and were in Bahai an hour or so later, landing on a strip of gravel with only desert as far as we could see in every direction. There was nothing green anywhere. The ground was not flat, though, so horizons were actually closer than they first appeared. There were gently rising hills, valleys, dried wadis, and patches of sand too soft to drive on. It was dangerous to get stuck here. Robberies were frequent, and someone had been shot shortly before we arrived. The border was less than a kilometre away, unguarded. We caught a ride on the back of a pickup truck to the town of Bahai, which was really little more than a village of mud brick buildings with a large market nearby. A UNHCR outpost had been set up, and we were invited to stay there. It was walled, with a guard at the gate. There was a latrine and a wash station with intermittent water, and a low-slung concrete building. Several of the rooms were empty, and Donald, Mohammad, and I were given space to sleep indoors, along with Italian photographer Marco Di Lauro, and Bo Søndergaard and Jan Grarup, a Danish writer-photographer team.

  The Oure Cassoni refugee camp. Photo courtesy of Donald Weber.

  Mohammad and I spent the afternoon talking to SLA members in the Oure Cassoni camp, and, by satellite phone, with those across the border in Darfur. Bahai had a slightly anarchic feel to it. There was no visible security presence other than the armed men employed by aid agencies to keep their compounds safe. The market — a ramshackle collection of stalls and narrow alleys — was always crowded but there wasn’t much buying and selling going on. The available food, other than onions and garlic, was mostly dried or canned and had come from far away. One vendor sold leather wallets bearing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

  Late that afternoon we returned to the UN compound. One of the local boys who worked there was standing on the wings of a black-feathered rooster to stop it from struggling while he sawed at its neck with a dull knife. The rooster’s blood, pooling into the sand, was dark and viscous. When the bird was dead, the boy flung its carcass on hot coals to singe its feathers and make them easier to pluck.

  The compound’s director was waiting for us. “Abéché was attacked this afternoon,” she said.

  It turned out that shortly after we had left, a column from a rebel group calling itself the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development, almost certainly a proxy for the government of Sudan, had assaulted the town, clashing with members of the Chadian army there and driving them out. The rebels then looted everything of value they could find, including from warehouses belonging to the World Food Program. Prison guards fled and detainees escaped. Several civilians were shot dead. That night the rebels still occupied the city.

  “No one’s flying in or out of Abéché,” the director continued. “You’re going to be here for a while.”

  We, and everyone else in Bahai, were effectively trapped. There were no safe roads out of the area, and it was doubtful that we could find the gas necessary to guarantee passage to N’Djamena, were we to make a run for it. Besides, no one knew where the rebels would hit next. They had assaulted N’Djamena itself in April, only seven months earlier, before they were beaten back, and now appeared to be striking westward again. It was late November. I started to get a bad feeling that I would be leaving Janyce, who was by now pregnant with our first child, Norah, alone for Christmas. I reached her that night on the satellite phone. She was on her way to Montreal to cover a Canadian political convention.

  “I heard about it on the BBC,” she said. “Are you safe?”

  “Yeah. The fighting isn’t close. But we can’t go anywhere.”

  “I had my first ultrasound this morning.”

  “Could you see anything?”

  “Sort of. I think it was sucking its thumb.”

  “My sister did that.”

  “I heard the heartbeat.”

  “How’d that sound?”

  “Fast.”

  Bahai wasn’t home to much besides aid agencies and a refugee camp, but it also had a hospital that was in worse shape than the one in Goz Beida. Patients lay on thin and dirty mattresses on the floor, cigarette ash scattered around them. But the rundown condition of the place appeared to be the result of poverty rather than neglect. Bedpans were emptied, bandages changed.

  Many of those sprawled on the hospital floor were survivors of a recent battle between the Sudan Liberation Army and the Sudanese army. They had clashed across the border near Kariari, where the SLA attacked an army encampment and killed as many as 300 Sudanese soldiers. The surviving Sudanese spent four days bleeding alone in the desert, surrounded by the bodies of their dead comrades, before they too were brought to Bahai, a stronghold of their SLA enemy. In the hospital the Sudanese soldiers lay next to the rebels they had tried to kill the previous month. It was impossible to tell who belonged to which side without asking. All were without uniforms, their shattered limbs splinted and elevated with basic pulleys.

  “We have become friends and brothers,” one man said.

  “War is political,” another added. “Here in the hospital we’re all the same.”

  The Sudanese soldiers gave different answers when asked if their unit had worked with local janjaweed militias. Some said no. But it later became clear that a column of Arab horsemen had joined their unit for several weeks to guide them through Darfur’s unfamiliar territory. The Arabs were then evacuated by plane, leaving the soldiers with little ammunition in unfamiliar territory.

  Most of the Sudanese soldiers were from black tribes outside of Darfur. They said they had little idea why there were being deployed in Darfur. One claimed he was told he was being sent to Somalia as a peacekeeper. “I got here and found the situation was awful,” another said. “The villages were mostly burned and empty. The people were gone. The government never told us the truth. I had to learn that from local people.… They wanted those of us who are Africans to fight each other. They wanted to empty Darfur of black people.”

  “There is a saying in Sudan,” another added. “If you want to hit a slave, it is best to use another slave to do it.”

  Meanwhile, the rebels who had attacked Abéché and s
tranded us in Bahai pulled out of the city. But there were reports of fresh violence in nearby Biltine, which was assaulted and occupied by a second rebel column, leading to more ransacking and looting. No one seemed to know where the main rebel force was heading. It consisted of hundreds of men and boys on pickup trucks, armed mostly with machine guns, assault rifles, and rocket launchers. They could race hundreds of miles through the desert scrub and then melt away. Chadian forces were clearly unable to stop them. The French military, however, had a presence at an airbase in Abéché and secured its perimeter. International aid agency staff had withdrawn to the base during the fighting, and the French air force agreed to fly them to the relative safety of N’Djamena. The United Nations was sending a plane to Bahai to bring out its non-essential staff and offered us space on the flight. We spent a final night in the compound, cooking a meal of dried pasta and fresh garlic that we bought in town. We ate it by candlelight and washed it down with cans of beer that had somehow been trucked in and sold at the market for a buck apiece. We got drunk and played poker for stones and pebbles. An antelope that had been adopted by the United Nations security detail bolted around the enclosure, leaping twenty feet at a time and not making a sound.

  The small plane that picked us up the next morning and flew to Abéché descended over the airport in a tight corkscrew to avoid any potential ground fire. We slept at the French base, bedding down outside on army cots with built-in mesh covers to keep out malarial mosquitoes. There was some minor chaos at the French aircraft hangar in the morning as the dozens of people hoping to leave queued for space on a military transport jet that taxied on the baking tarmac outside. It wasn’t obvious who was in charge — the French military or the United Nations.

  A UN official approached me as I waited in line with Donald, Marco, and the two Danes. Mohammad was nearby, talking to some Chadians on the staff of an international NGO. “Your translator can’t come,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We can only evacuate foreigners.”

  My stomach dropped. A few seconds before, we watched the large transport plane that would take us to safety land outside the hangar and felt safe and relieved enough to joke about how quickly our luck had turned for the better. We wouldn’t be spending Christmas in the desert after all.

  “Mohammad’s not from here,” I said. “He’s from N’Djamena. There’s a war outside the base. You can’t abandon him here because he’s the wrong nationality.”

  “I’m sorry. We have our regulations.”

  I spent the next twenty minutes arguing, with increasing frustration and urgency, in English and in French, with different United Nations staff members. They sat at wooden tables with clipboards and lists in front of them while others begged for space on the plane. They talked about rules and avoided looking people in the eyes. They said they were very sorry. Those not picked to leave got angry. Their voices sounded scared.

  Disorder increased as the plane’s departure time neared. I argued that Mohammad’s family was in the capital and he had no way of getting to them except on this plane. And besides, I was responsible for him and couldn’t leave him here. United Nations officials didn’t want to deal with me. They passed me on to their colleagues and their bosses, who passed me back. I got angrier and more desperate. Nobody would budge.

  “It’s okay,” Mohammad said to me, but clearly it was not. His face streamed with beads of sweat. The French military was trying to separate those with spots on the plane from those without. All our bags were strapped down under military webbing on wooden pallets. The plane was about to leave. I gave Mohammad most of the money I owed him and promised to leave the balance at a hotel in N’Djamena, as a soldier ushered him outside the aircraft hangar.

  This was the moment when, for me, the moral foundation that underpins international aid organizations began to dissolve. The United Nations, the World Food Program, the Red Cross, the whole lot of them, will feed and shelter millions of people. They’ll save lives. They’ll provide locals with jobs translating, guarding their compounds, and driving at which they’ll make more money than they could hope to earn doing anything else in a flyblown patch of desert next to a war. But when the shit hits the fan, when it really hits the fan, and there are pickup trucks full of murderous, strung-out teenagers with AK-47s prowling outside of town, then there are two classes of people: the mostly white internationals inside the aircraft hangar about to be flown to safety, and the black and vulnerable locals outside the wire waiting for hell to arrive.

  I stood in line with the other chosen ones picked for evacuation. Guilt burned in my gut like acid. “Fuck it,” I muttered, mostly to myself.

  I left the line and jogged toward the hangar’s exit. A French soldier — young, female, gorgeous, blonde hair in a ponytail — was standing at the gate. Normally I would have smiled or said hello. I walked past her. By now I was sweating, too. I couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t tried.

  “If you leave this area, you can’t get back,” another, more senior male French officer said as I passed.

  I saw Mohammad a little ways on. I called to him. He came to me as I approached the UN official I had argued with since Mohammad was turned away. I leaned over her desk and launched into the same arguments, my face less than a foot from hers, my uneven French making me sound even more belligerent than I would have in English. Other UN staff began to gather around defensively. Mohammad, visibly worried but calm, stood behind me, following the English bits of the conversation.

  “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. Only foreigners are allowed on the plane,” she said, repeating the same reasoning I had heard half a dozen times already.

  Mohammad interjected. “I’m a foreigner, too,” he said. “I was born in Sudan.”

  With that, he sliced through the red tape that was keeping him off the plane. Mohammad had spent most of his life in Chad, and the country was now his home. But once he was able to produce a faded, barely legible document showing he had been born in another country, he joined the protected ranks of French and Belgian aid workers, and Canadian journalists. I walked him back into the hangar, past the beautiful French soldier, into the line with the other internationals. Donald and the others were surprised and happy to see Mohammad and slapped him on the back. We filed onto the transport jet — a gunmetal-grey behemoth. Inside, pallets of gear were strapped to the floor. The passengers sat facing each other on collapsible canvas-and-metal seats. The engines roared to life and the plane rolled forward. I pulled on the noise-muffling headphones that had been hanging above. Facing me across the plane’s cargo hold, Mohammad smiled. I looked around him. There were empty seats.

  N’Djamena’s streets were close to deserted when we arrived, save for Chadian soldiers preparing for an expected assault on the capital. Our bubble of a hotel still served beer and cheeseburgers. Rebel columns ranged across eastern Chad for several more weeks, attacking Guéréda, northeast of Abéché and clashing with Chadian forces all along its frontier. They faded away, only to reappear in greater strength a little more than a year later, this time reaching and directly assaulting N’Djamena. They were again forced back, but not before tens of thousands of Chadian civilians fled the capital across the border to Cameroon.

  In March 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the actions of Sudanese soldiers and janjaweed in Darfur. A charge of genocide was added in July 2010.

  Meanwhile, al-Bashir and Chadian President Idriss Déby sought to normalize relations between their two countries. Al-Bashir visited Chad in 2010. As a member of the International Criminal Court and a signatory to the Rome Statute, Chad was supposedly bound to honour the global court’s warrant and detain al-Bashir, but did not. The Sudanese president described his visit as a success.

  Eight

  Holy Lands

  On a clear day, from a hilltop outside Ramallah, just about dead centre o
f all the land controlled by Israel, it is possible to look east and see the mountains of Jordan, another country, then turn around and see the smudged skyline of Tel Aviv and, a little farther on, the ocean. One sweeping glance captures the boundaries of a conflict that has persisted for more than sixty years and continues to divide so much of the world. There are a lot of ways to start thinking about Israel and Palestine, but it helps to remember how geographically minuscule is the land in question. There isn’t a lot of space to share.

  Israel’s earliest advocates understood the challenge their dreamed-of homeland would face years before the Zionist project really got under way. Shortly after Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, published The Jewish State in 1896, two Viennese rabbis decided to travel to the Middle East to explore for themselves the idea of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Their visit resulted in a cable home in which the two rabbis wrote: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”

  Not much has changed. At its heart the conflict is still about two peoples who covet the same patch of land. Other territories are similarly fought over, but this one gets all the attention. Jerusalem must have more foreign correspondents than any other city in the world. There are good reasons for this. The conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and surrounding Arab states lies at the heart of Arab and Muslim grievances with the West. Israel is a screen on which so many anti-Semites project their hatreds, and Jews their hopes. Jerusalem itself is holy to half the world’s population. And for those looking for what the Israeli historian Benny Morris described as “righteous victims,” there are plenty: Israeli victims of terrorism, rocket attacks, and the fear of another existential war; and Palestinian ones of air strikes and the constant crush of occupation.