by Tom Bamforth
Back in Muzaffarabad the winter had started and, as predicted, the camps turned to mud. We had received some funds to work and were now attempting to ‘winterise’ the leaky canvas from the year before, wrapping tents in huge quantities of plastic, digging drainage ditches and trying to ensure that they were nowhere the camp toilets, whose effluent drained randomly. The rains increased and the ground became increasingly waterlogged.
The Refugee Commissioner had continued to try to pull down the camps where he could and send people ‘home’, back up the windy, unstable roads whose edges had been deeply corroded by the earthquake and had fallen into the deep Himalayan ravines and valleys below. I joined up with a specialist ‘alpine unit’ from the UN Operations Department to monitor return conditions in winter of a convoy of thirty vehicles heading from Muzaffarabad to the Leepa Valley. The report was stark:
At an altitude of 2700 metres, a new snow avalanche had descended and blocked the road. The avalanche had been partially cleared but posed a significant obstacle to vehicles, being at a steep incline and on a tight hairpin bend. It took a skilled local driver in a jeep 20 minutes to traverse the avalanche debris. There was a further sector of the road where avalanches were expected. It was observed that, further on, deep mud ruts were developing on the road surface. By 16h00 the weather began to deteriorate with a cold north wind and freezing rain falling. By 16h20 a group of 8 jeeps were blocked by a snow avalanche. The drivers did not appear to be skilled in these conditions and their attempts to pass were weak and disorganised. None of the vehicles had snow chains and the tyres were worn and lacked deep tread. A second wave of 12 vehicles arrived at 17h20. Darkness due to fall at 17h40.
With further snow expected at higher altitudes, return by road was, in the words of the alpine team, ‘a dubious policy in safety terms’. We discussed alternatives if the road was inaccessible—there was some spare helicopter capacity, and if the people and the government agreed there was a possibility of flying the camp’s residents back to their places of origin in the Leepa Valley, but we had to be sure that life and livelihoods were sustainable when they got there, and this was dubious given what we knew about the road at the relatively low attitude of 2700 metres. The best thing was for people to remain in the camp with as many relief supplies and as much ‘winterisation’ as we could get. But when I got back to the camp the next day they had disappeared—driven out by more government trucks, along the extremely hazardous road to their destroyed homes that were now under snow.
Outraged at our inability to get any sort of reasonable solution to the problem of residual camps, I contacted two journalists from the BBC and they agreed to head up and film the results. If we could get nowhere through negotiation, then our last resort was to expose what was happening. But by now the route was untraceable and the people who had been in the camp had disappeared into the mountains. The BBC crew filmed miserable snow-clad villages and the nerve-wracking jeep manoeuvres past avalanches on unstable roads. The film ended with an interview over tea with the commissioner’s wife. ‘The relief effort is going very well,’ she said. ‘Its simply swimmingly marvellous.’
CALLING FROM THE TOP of a rubbish dump in the earthquake-destroyed city in Muzaffarabad, I could connect by phone to Khartoum. And from the foothills of the Himalayas, overlooking the Vale of Kashmir and the Neelum and Jhelum rivers, I accepted a job in Darfur.
‘Time to move,’ I was told by wiser heads. ‘Once the emergency phase is over the politics starts, development intervenes, and nothing happens.’ During the earthquake, the mantra of relief workers was ‘Don’t make a catastrophe out of a crisis’. The real catastrophe was elsewhere—no matter how bad the destruction and loss of life in Pakistan, it was a different order of magnitude to the catastrophe of Darfur. All disasters and emergencies are to some degree ‘man-made’: in Pakistan, we saw complicity through poor construction standards and a sluggish government response. In Darfur the decision had been taken by the country’s president and senior leaders to kill, rape and displace, systematically and indiscriminately, whole groups of people based on an increasingly racialised conception of ethnicity. Belatedly, and after the worst of the killing spree was over, the international community had turned its head towards Darfur.
From Islamabad I flew to Melbourne, wincing as the customs officer in Lahore stamped my passport with a red X and the words Do not readmit, and from Melbourne to London and then back again across the globe to Dubai, and Amman and Khartoum. I sat next to young Americans mostly on this Middle Eastern leg—some naive and some sceptical, the fresh-faced and the haggard, mercenaries and Wilsonian internationalists. It was my reading matter that started the conversations on the plane—and ironic, perhaps, that Orwell had become hallowed ground for these illiberal interventionists going to reshape the Middle East.
I flew on, transcending worlds and time while watching videos in my metal tube, until fifty hours after I started, dots of houses emerged from the expanse of desert tan, clinging tightly to the confluence of the White and Blue Niles. From the air Khartoum came into view—not the resonant place of my imagination conjured by the words Omdurman and dervish, the place of heroic imperial last stands, the literal and metaphorical ‘heart of Africa’—but a neat, modern city arranged in lines, perched precariously on the edge of vast waves of desert tending massively and irrevocably to the interior.
‘Call me Ernie,’ he said. ‘My name’s Hernando, but all the guys in Geneva call me Ernie—do you know the guys in Geneva?’
I regretted that I didn’t know the guys in Geneva, and it was a refrain that echoed again and again as my newly arrived colleague Ernie and I made our way from the hotel to the Khartoum office and back again. We had both been sent to the ‘operation’ in Sudan, knew no one, and had little conception of what we were actually supposed to do. After a brief meeting with my supervisor, whose only words—‘I see you’ve made it’—were uttered without looking up between emails, I remained unenlightened.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ernie reassured me when I wondered how long we were going to sit around in Khartoum, ‘the guys in Geneva are all over it.’
But the days passed slowly as I went through endless rounds of briefings. A political advisor from the UN took me into the organisation’s map room, where I stood gazing at the neat, sanitised cartography of war. Maps of flat, empty space marked with crosses to indicate major battles, circles for cities, and triangles to show refugee camps. Dotted lines marked possible roads whose existence and accessibility no one could really guarantee. The only permanent fixtures were thick black lines representing international borders, labelled Libya and Chad—a misplaced assertion of certainty, as I discovered, because these borders meant nothing in a conflict that engulfed the Sahara, a conflict that found its geographical echo in drought, displacement and gradual desertification. The movements of time, politics and a changing climate had little use for lines on maps. Layered onto these humanitarian maps was a political map that showed spreading, amorphous shapes that represented estimates of areas under the control of a dozen progovernment and rebel groups—expanding, contracting, realigning with the cruel exigencies of irregular desert warfare. ‘Nobody really knows what they represent,’ said the political advisor. ‘It’s the best we can do but most of it’s made up in Khartoum.’
As I was going into the ‘field’, I was subjected to a comprehensive security briefing. I was told how to walk around a car before getting in and what to do if a lion suddenly appeared. There had been a vast and unexpected migration of animals across the continent that year and I was to stay clear of marauding gazelle. Snakes were generally considered bad, and the gung-ho security advisor discussed the relative merits of ‘going it’ if attacked by gunmen on a motorbike while driving. Clearly living in a world of action movies, he thought the best approach would be to ram them. He had never actually been out of Khartoum, he confided. The SAS motto Who dares, wins was clearly an inspiration to him, although he’d had to adapt it for civilian humanitarian
workers. As he sent me on my way he slapped me on the back, saying, ‘Who lives, wins!’
Sudan appeared further and further away. Ernie had managed to find himself a filing cabinet and a desk, where he spent his days furiously busy with reams of paperwork. Our newbie camaraderie diminished to a tight-lipped grunt over coffee in the morning at the hotel. Lunchtime walks revealed empty, quiet streets, and aside from the fine clinging dust on my boots, I found nothing beyond an elegant pizza restaurant with a garden setting and a French-speaking chef. There were shops and supermarkets; an international embargo meant that even though the banking system did not operate, the shelves were overflowing with imported produce, priced in US dollars. In the centre of town, a curved plate-glass tower modelled on London’s Gherkin had just been finished, shunning both gravity and right-angles in its ultra-modernity.
After work I was taken by colleagues to a cafe by the Nile. Surrounded by lush ferns we sat outside with Khartoum’s elite, watching the sunset in the thick, humid heat of the early evening, cooled by water vapour sprayed across the garden, and ate freshly made sorbet. ‘This is the most peaceful city in the world. There is no crime here,’ someone said without a trace of irony.
And yet everything around was evidence of massive state-sponsored criminality. The wealth of Khartoum and the immense prosperity of its sorbet-sucking residents were the product of decades of economic, political and cultural strangulation of the rest of the country by Sudan’s riverine elite. Shortly before I arrived, the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for senior cabinet ministers, including the head of the Orwellian Humanitarian Aid Commission, for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur. This was a prelude to the ICC’s subsequent indictment of the country’s head of state, Omar al-Bashir, for the same crimes, authorised by him but carried out by radicalised local militias called janjawiid (a compound word derived from the G3 rifle, jawad meaning horse and an Eastern Sudanese dialect word for outlaws). These turbaned ‘devils on horseback’ had contributed to the deaths of between 350,000 and 450,000 people, with another 3.5 million—more than half of Darfur’s population—displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance. ‘You are informed’, wrote janjawiid leader Musa Hilal to one of his subordinates in Darfur, citing orders from President Bashir himself, ‘that directives have been issued … to change the demography of Darfur and empty it of its African tribes’.1 It was becoming clear that the ‘guys in Geneva’ really didn’t have a clue.
As we flew over El Fasher airport in North Darfur in a Cessna C-130 on a UN Humanitarian Air Service flight, the military realities of the maps I’d studied earlier in Khartoum—with their lines, legends and amorphous colouring of the political landscape—began to dawn. On the edge of the runway, new helicopter gunships sat ready for action, but were dwarfed by an enormous white plane.
‘That’s the Antonov,’ the South African pilot muttered as we landed, and I made my way past bored guards and towards a small shop selling gleaming lines of cold Pepsi.
The Antonov was the white elephant of the war in Darfur: vast, lumbering, and symbolic of the regime’s indiscriminate killing. It was a Soviet-era military cargo plane designed to carry tanks, but in Darfur it was used as an instrument of terror. It flew over villages dropping bombs that were rolled out from its giant hold by hand—killing that was at once industrial and primitive. The Antonov was painted white—the colour of humanitarian agencies—and before I arrived its wings had been marked with the letters UN, showing the regime’s total disregard for life, law and the work of aid organisations. Each evening at dusk, from the concrete room where we worked, all conversation was drowned in the roar of its engines as the Antonov took off for another bombing run from the same airstrip used to bring in humanitarian workers and supplies.
The Antonov instilled terror and targeted not rebel combatants but clusters of villages, food stores and water wells, but the truly deadly assaults came from militias armed with ‘technicals’. In the early days of the conflict the militias had been mounted on horseback or camels, but as the war progressed Khartoum armed them with technicals—Land Cruisers with the top sawn off and mounted with a machine gun. They were used with the Antonov in coordinated attacks on civilians. These attacks were aimed not only at wiping out people but their means of subsistence as well—‘to change the demography’, as Musa Hilal had put it. ‘They kill us because of our black faces,’ said one man I spoke to months later in a village called Doruk that had been attacked.
For three weeks before the mission, I listened to the sounds of war, closed up in concrete offices, protected by floodlights, barbed wire and the flags, colours and protective heraldry of the international community. Curfew at seven, radio check at ten—This is Foxtrot Mike loud and clear. At six each evening, as I finished work at the office, all thoughts and conversations were drowned by the raw noise and aggression of the Antonov taking off for its evening bombing run.
During the day, I inhabited a small, hot, concrete bunker with blocked-in windows. From this makeshift office I worked as a ‘protection officer’, trying to gather information about population movements and the humanitarian conditions of people displaced by the Darfur conflict. Going home one evening through a back street near the market, I turned suddenly onto the main road and pulled up sharp as a technical accelerated past. Camouflage, rocket launchers, guns, and the shouts of men moving out of town, seeking a kill. A roar of noise went up—a full-blooded bark simultaneously bursting from twenty men on edge—as the mounted machine gun slowly turned towards the car. And in the car’s cabin, paralysis took hold and my brain went numb; my white and useless strapped-in limbs drooped heavily into the seat. A distorted voice—my own—wrenched in through the din with instructions for every muscle and every action. Move slowly, put your hand on the gears, put the car in reverse, move slowly, drive back, go slow, get back, shrink away, retreat. And as they receded, the sweat came, the shaking and the nausea.
At dusk, the firing started from outside town. In our compound, recently equipped with satellite TV, men watched Milan Fashion Week to the irregular detonations from the firing range until it was time for the insurgency channel—amateur videos of militia violence filmed in Iraq, watched by aid workers in Darfur. Parallel realities that only intersected on one occasion when a stray bullet that had been fired into the air smashed through the roof and embedded itself in the concrete floor of the TV room.
Despite the sounds around us, Darfur was remote. We were locked away in offices and compounds, barely allowed out because of the passing traffic of militia and the endless fluctuations of alliances between local commanders and factions—Sudan rarely imposed. The billowing dust from a sweeper’s broom in the morning, the rich Arabic coffee in the afternoon, took me temporarily away from maps, computer screens and reports of fighting, casualties, people on the move.
‘They’re trying to fuck us over,’ my boss would say each morning, but she was referring to our colleagues in Khartoum.
I was involved in two major field ‘missions’, as humanitarian operations were called, in a language that merged military with missionary terminology. These involved organising refugee convoys from conflict-affected areas on the Chad–West Darfur border and leading assessment teams in search of recently displaced people in North Darfur in an area called Dar Zaghawa. Initially, the intent had been to monitor the humanitarian conditions of people returning to their places of origin following the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) in 2006. This peace was ineffective, however, and was ignored by all sides. It had further split Darfurian opposition groups, making successive peace negotiations more difficult, and had provided an inadequate basis for an African Union intervention force that lacked the resources, mandate and military cohesion to alter the course of the war. Despite initial high hopes, it had been mired in bureaucracy and could not even provide effective protection to women collecting water in camps—a daily task that took women outside the nominal security of the camps’ perimeter and bro
ught with it the risk of rape, murder and abduction—let alone for the dispersed rural civilian population in an area the size of France. As a result of its failings, the African Union force had become so detested that Darfuri rebel groups had started to attack it. Some weeks after I arrived, fifteen Senegalese soldiers were killed in a raid led by the one Darfuri rebel organisation that had actually signed the DPA and had earlier supported the establishment of a peacekeeping mission. It was, as one military observer noted, ‘classic peacekeeping in an environment so wildly not a classic peace as to be ridiculous’. For the people of Darfur, there had been no peace and no one was going home. In a war frequently referred to as ‘our Spain’, the efforts to end a mass crime that toxically fused a racialised state ideology with brutal power calculations lacked international resources, commitment, and sincerity.
What was happening in Darfur was new and represented a vicious unravelling of the old order. In the 1980s, the academic Alex de Waal had travelled to Darfur and met with a leading tribal elder called Sheikh Hilal Musa, father of the notorious militia leader Musa Hilal. In a tent sparsely furnished with saddles, carpets, water jars and spears—the possessions of a life of desert nomadism—the old sheikh had recounted a ‘moral geography’ of the land. This was a grid, drawn in the sand, which showed an interlocking pattern of land use and migration. Nomads and camel herders had travelled along transhumance routes that occupied certain squares on the grid, while agriculturalists occupied others. When the nomads moved into an area they tended it well, looked after gardens, protected villages and left it safe to return. Similarly, agriculturalists allowed access to grazing lands as the herders moved from pasture to pasture with the changing seasons. Gifts were exchanged—on arrival a goat would be sacrificed for the herders by the agriculturalists, and on their departure a camel would be given to the agriculturalists in return. The linguistic, religious and ethnic make-up of Darfur reflected this cooperation. An independent sultanate until 1916, when it was annexed to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Darfur had developed its own separate social fabric and state identity. Arabic had become the common language, in addition to the local tribal languages, and intermarriage was common—making the region almost uniquely cosmopolitan. There was a strong tradition of Sufi Islam, which synchretised Muslim and local traditions of religious practice. ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ were not meaningful divisions in Darfur and even Sheikh Hilal, despite his casual racism and assumptions of the superiority of his tribe and nomadic way of life, boasted about his ‘African’ antecedents.