by Tom Bamforth
Here was almost a scene of normality: children played under the watchful eye of their mothers, preparations were beginning for evening meals, fires were being stoked, wood collected. There were no young men—they were away, fighting, moving in a perpetual arc from refugee camps where they were registered and could collect food and organise themselves politically, to their farmland, which they sought to defend, and to their families in hiding in the forest. The houses were made of interlaced branches and thatched roofs built around the base of the tree trunk—barely visible from the ground and completely invisible from the air.
‘We came here because of the Antonov,’ they said. ‘Here we are safe, they cannot see us in the forest.’
They had been driven there a year ago. The Antonov had bombed the town and a subsequent land assault by government-sponsored militia had pushed them back, the rebels fighting for the land. Periodically the Antonov returned but there had not been any further land attacks. The defence had not saved the houses but had saved most of the people—already, cowering from the air raid, they heard the land attack revving before dawn.
‘I am just a farmer,’ an old man told me and reached down quickly, hands trembling, for a cigarette.
And they were not alone. In town after town the same stories of displacement and dislocation were repeated. The mere sound of the Antonov was enough to send people fleeing for the trees and the wadis. Sometimes it just flew over, sometimes bombs would fall, sometimes it was the fatal foreplay for a dawn assault of technicals. Outside another village, I came across a small group of men sitting under a tree. There were about twenty of them and the silence was uncanny. No, they were not from the local village, but they had taken refuge there—under the tree—and had brought some of their animals following a surprise attack only two days before. In the insane calculus of desperation and destruction some of the men had taken as many animals as they could—the income and livelihood of the tribe. They had left women, children and the elderly to find what sanctuary they could in the care of other members of the tribe. But now, having escaped, they feared the worst—that those left behind had been caught in the suddenness of the attack, butchered or raped. As we talked, the temperature rose and the exhausted listlessness was replaced quickly with increasing anger and agitation as the men began to find voice and rage. They were now sleeping rough on the outskirts of the village and knew nothing of what had happened to their families or where they were, but thought that the janjawiid militia might follow them into Dar Zaghawa, even though they suspected that the majority had been killed in the attacks. One man—tall, dark-skinned, and dressed with an extraordinary dignity—came to me with a book. Abdul Aziz Adum Haroon, the village teacher, had written down all the names of the people in the village before the attack, and had the foresight to take the book with him as he fled. There were 6200 names.
In this atmosphere of fetid hopelessness we worked. And as we talked, stories began to emerge. We came with nothing but our forms to guide us in recording the conditions in which they lived, and told them that we could not deliver or promise anything. We needed information—who, where and what. But nobody seemed to mind; in many ways just our being there mattered—a presence from the outside, a sign of interest and concern, however small and insignificant. For many, simply telling their story was important in itself. Some people told us about their daily routines—the quests for water, food, the bitter taste of ground berries. On more than one occasion, I was taken aside and shown the scars of previous attacks: bullet markings, knife cuts. ‘This is what they did—and this’. But always there was the deafening silence of the dead—the subtext of every conversation, the unstated absence in every village, stories present but untold. The only real grief I saw was for a survivor: an elderly man, now largely blind and physically weak, saying farewell to his daughters who had made the decision to send him to a refugee camp, where he might have some hope of food and care. In that village near the Chad border they could barely feed themselves, let alone those who had become dependent, and Darfur is not a place where people grow old. The children here had discoloured hair and enlarged stomachs and they were strangely passive, not moving as the flies settled in numbers around their eyes.
Some had decided to move to the camp, others made the calculation that they would risk staying behind—perhaps to be closer to land, farms or family. To all of us watching it was obvious that, alone and old, the man would not last long. I stood aside, held our convoy, and waited for this last horrendous farewell.
But there were moments of magic too. I laid out a reed matt on the ground each evening and slept outside. One night, unable to sleep, I climbed over the pile of protective sandbags that was our nominal defence, and took the most miraculous night-time stroll of my life, following a moonlit path across a wadi and into Chad. It is the night sky I remember most. I had first become captivated by this in Pakistan where, when work finally finished for the night, I would go out into the winter cold and look up to see the small rust-coloured dot of far-distant Mars—fittingly alien amid the profound disturbance of the earthquake zone where I was working. In Darfur’s desert—seen from space, nothing more than a vast tract of darkness—it became possible to look forward to the pyrotechnic brilliance of the night sky. At a certain point after dinner, conversation would stop and people would lie on the ground gazing upwards, transported for the night, away from the sun, the heat and the political realities of the day.
We were generally well looked after by the SLA. They accompanied us on all the roads with their battered technicals and teenage soldiers. They dressed themselves in camouflage turbans with arms tightly bound with numerous hijab—small leather pouches containing Koranic verses. Rocket-propelled grenades were strapped to the sides and bonnet of the cars.
The African Union also had a small presence where we stayed in the deserted town called Um Baru. Here, French-speaking Senegalese troops were commanded by a fat Libyan with a large lapel badge showing Colonel Gaddafi waving to a crowd (it was rumoured that when you turned the badge upside down you got a hologram of Hawaiian dancing girls). However, while the colonel and our SLA escort sipped tea and chatted cordially, this relationship was deeply strained. Only a week before, the SLA had attacked the African Union and killed five Senegalese soldiers. Now they were blocking African Union access to the waterhole in murderous protest against the ineffectiveness of this force in stopping the war.
Fearing attacks on the African Union compound, we stayed instead with the SLA, who provided us with a ‘guesthouse’, a term that proved somewhat misleading. There was a small concrete bunker with disturbing graffiti scratched into the walls by deranged SLA soldiers. It showed technicals and roughly drawn human outlines shooting fireballs at each other. The other facility was a slaughter area which featured a small tree where a goat (that evening’s meal) would be tethered among the carcasses of its caprine cousins.
Out of SLA territory, however, we had less luck. Our car broke down and a driver decided to embark on amateur mechanics. This turned into brake surgery and he eventually discovered that he could not get the dismantled parts back together. After five hours of his banging and cursing, we realised that we could not make it through the next GoS checkpoint and into the nearest town before nightfall. The checkpoints are nothing more than soldiers dug defensively behind rock or on top of a hill commanding the road. These are sensitive areas and have to be approached carefully—the soldiers are undisciplined. They resemble a militia more than a regular army and are often hard to see. After dark, they have orders to shoot on sight. We managed to tow the car back 10 kilmetres to the previous checkpoint and spoke to the commander, who reluctantly allowed us to camp in a wadi under the GoS command post on a neighbouring hill. It was an uneasy night—we circled our four cars (one with a defunct back wheel, another with a severely bent front axle) and could not light a fire, cook, or turn on our torches for fear of being shot at. The sand was soft and warm and the night sky brilliant, but at the change of the guard the
new commander took a dislike to us and at 5am sent a dozen men with rocket launchers to move us on.
The strain of the previous night then began to turn into farce. We managed to get our car to the next checkpoint (breaking two steel towropes) and rather uneasily left it there, all fourteen people and one sheep piling into the two remaining operable vehicles and limping along as fast as the bent axle would take us. After several overcrowded and dehydrated hours we reached the town of Kutum—the nearest big town with international agencies and the possibility of food and showers. We made our way to the World Food Program where, despite no food or sleep for two days, we tried to find a mechanic to go back through the Damra with us to claim our car before it was annexed by one or other of the militias. Standing around making calls on satellite phones, unshaven and unwashed after ten gruelling days in the field, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a delegation that included the newly appointed global head of the World Food Program. In fact, we were so well-placed that we formed a grotty and accidental greeting committee: shaking hands, smiling, welcoming the dignitaries to the compound in front of innumerable cameramen, coiffed PR officers and other equally pomaded lackeys dug up for the occasion. After three arduous weeks in the desert, a passing witness to the imbecility and human cost of war, I stood for a moment in front of one of the most influential humanitarians in the world.
‘Where’s my yoghurt?’ she said …
WHILE THE PAKISTAN earthquake had seemed to some extent solvable, armed conflict presents a deeper challenge to the ambitions of humanitarians. Natural disasters are classified as ‘complicated’ while conflicts are deemed ‘complex’. In the earthquake, despite the many challenges, there was a sense that emergency needs, at least, were to some extent finite. A particular number of homes had been lost, a specific number of people had been affected. Therefore, if the relief effort went well and was well-funded, emergency needs could be met—the technocratic thinking that underpins the actions of every relief agency and funds a growing number of disaster statisticians, information managers, epidemiologists and demographers.
Conflict is different and altogether murkier. When I stood on top of that Muzaffarabad rubbish pile and was offered a job working in Darfur, I was told that this was a place where we were ‘really needed’. But in conflict, the calculations of disaster statisticians matter less and are used indicatively—to paint a picture, rather than to guide the response. When I arrived in Darfur in 2007, estimates of the humanitarian consequences of the war varied. Initially, 200,000 had been killed in the fighting but this figure seemed too low. It was increased in 50,000 increments over the months to 250,000 before finally averaging out at 350,000. The point was not about the figures but to say that, no matter how accurate they were, they were morally incalculable. Each number represented a brutal, preventable enumeration of each individual death and loss. No known measure exists to quantify brutality, and statistics are brushstrokes in the portrayal of destruction. The vagueness of numbers (except for those of the agencies that keep detailed records of how many people they are feeding or providing medical treatment, which in any case only poorly symbolise an event) was an indication of the uncertainty of humanitarian agencies. The ‘solutions’ to the Darfur crisis did not lie in tents and tarpaulins, food distributions or medical programs, life-saving though these interventions are, but in the political and military calculations made by the Sudanese state and its militia allies—policies over which no aid agency has any influence.
In an African context, this portrayal—while true—had troubling repercussions. In the West, Africa was increasingly seen as an ongoing humanitarian crisis in itself, only newsworthy when there was ‘another’ major humanitarian catastrophe affecting hundreds of thousands of people. People noticeably talked about events ‘in Africa’ rather than naming the countries or contexts in which they occurred, overlooking regional differences, languages, cultures or other specificities. More frightening still was the language of barbarism that continued to underpin liberal concern about conflicts on the continent. ‘Why are African conflicts so brutal?’ asked a well-meaning friend, suggesting that there was a unique level of violence not experienced elsewhere—a kind of amnesia about the brutality of European history hidden behind the apparent order of wealthy societies.
This kind of thinking informed equally simplistic views about African conflicts: that they could be easily resolved through the intervention of ‘capable’ Western forces (Romeo Dallaire, commander of UN forces in Rwanda, propagated the myth that 5000 trained and equipped Western troops could have stopped the genocide); that conflicts are based on supposedly ancient ethnic and tribal tensions; and that development could be guided by the supposedly benign tutelage of Western aid agencies. ‘Buy a goat,’ runs the fundraising message associated with so many aid agencies, and you can ‘solve world poverty’. There was more than a grain of truth in the observation of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya, about ‘those professional friends of the African who are prepared to maintain their friendship for eternity as a sacred duty, provided only that the African will continue to play the part of the ignorant savage so that they can monopolize the office of interpreting his mind and speaking for him’.
A problem for humanitarian agencies working in conflict arises because they are often seen—and encourage people to see them—as bearers of a moral or ethical flame. They carry the weight of moral expectation from their donors and the engaged citizens of wealthier countries who genuinely want to see an end to conflict or a focus on long-term investment to reduce poverty. Yet in conflicts these agencies have limited, if any, scope or authority to do more than provide basic humanitarian services that will not ultimately affect the political or economic causes of war.
Some agencies, like Oxfam or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), use public denunciation to influence policies that their operational activities cannot. Others, like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with its hallowed tradition of Swiss neutrality, place priority on access to vulnerable people and so will only rarely comment publicly on the political motives that cause war and destruction. Along with private advocacy, the Red Cross pursues a narrower humanitarian agenda to try, against the odds, to ensure that civilians receive emergency life-saving assistance and are not targeted by any of the armed forces in a conflict. In a legal nicety, the ICRC therefore supports the Rome Statute (the basis in international law for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes genocide and crimes against humanity). The ICRC has a special exemption from appearing before the court itself or providing trial evidence based on the conduct of the conflicts in which it works. Unlike more advocacy-based assistance organisations, it supports the law but not the lawyers and judges who administer it or the invariable political consequences of the court’s decisions.
It is in conflict situations that the humanitarian ideal runs into the most difficulty. Some have argued that humanitarianism is beginning to take the place of ideology in a post–Cold War world infatuated with international law and other technocratic solutions to complex political, ethical and historical problems. In the past, activists have sought to change society radically for the better: to gain independence; to afford rights, protection and representation; to ensure justice and equality before the crushing wheels of the market or the majority. Humanitarianism, in its proper form, does none of these things—it only attempts to make things less worse. It is an extension of, and an improvement upon, the condescending but still prevalent concept of charity. For many NGOs and in university courses, the term ‘humanitarianism’ is magically imbued with the rump of liberal causes and ideas. In this view, humanitarian action can somehow promote human rights, stop wars, and further social justice. Although it touches on all of these things, humanitarianism is a practice—often a technical and technocratic response to people with immediate life-preserving needs. It cannot change the political, social, and cultural landscape in which humanitarian action takes pl
ace, no matter how appalling the situation. It is the provision of band-aids magnified to the thousandth degree. In some cases this is sufficient. But in many, if not most, situations humanitarian action falls woefully short of the moral, political and financial commitments needed to preserve life, dignity and the environment in the longer term. Humanitarian work is a limited mechanism that is often overburdened with expectations of a solution that it simply cannot provide. Something that becomes even more problematic when, as in Afghanistan, almost all of the relief agencies (with the exceptions of MSF and the ICRC) were entirely funded by the governments of the belligerent powers.
On Pakistan Day, August 2007, I escaped from the confinement of our ring-fenced office where the pressures of work and the cautions of overzealous security officers had us imprisoned in ‘lockdown’. Public holidays, religious festivals, meetings and gatherings of any sort—even Friday afternoon prayers—sent the ex-marine security officers from the UN Department of Safety and Security into paroxisms of fear. We were told to ‘reduce our profile’, take down flags and markings, park cars in the ‘go’ position, and for days and weeks on end we could not leave the secure compound with its high concrete walls and sleeping guards. Often alone in the office and annoyed by these restrictions, which I felt were completely unjustified, I made it my daily task to breach protocol in some way. At first this was a short lunchtime walk around the neighbourhood, which soon developed into chats with the local shop owners and an occasional game of street cricket. During lockdown, colleagues would sometimes come—strictly against orders—to keep me company and to continue to work in the best way we could, until finally Pakistan Day drew near and I was presented with an offer I could not refuse.