Tears of the Desert

by Halima Bashir

  The lady who ran the playgroup was a beautiful black woman called Samantha. She had gorgeous hair that fell to her waist. She befriended me, and she started to visit me at home. Eventually I told her my story, and she listened in floods of tears. She told me that she felt so sorry for me. Why didn’t I do some volunteer work, she asked? It would get me out and I would meet people. I told her that I needed to be here to look after my son. I found it so hard to trust people, and I wouldn’t let anyone else care for Mo.

  Little Mo was so precious to me. Little Mo was my life. It was he who had given me the will to live.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Will to Live

  Little Mo was approaching his first birthday, and still we had no news on my asylum claim. I had inquired about working as a doctor or even a nurse, but I’d been told that asylum seekers weren’t allowed to work. Sharif and I had tried to look for a bigger flat, but we soon realized that if no one would let me work then we couldn’t afford the rent. We were dying to get away, and we couldn’t believe how some of the people lived.

  In Zaghawa culture we have a saying: “Your nearest neighbor is better than your farthest relative.” It means that in your daily lives your neighbors might be more important to you than even your family. But it certainly didn’t seem to hold true here. Many of our neighbors were from hell.

  The woman next door had nine children, most with different fathers. The whole family seemed to live on benefits. Teenage kids were in and out at all hours, playing loud music, arguing and fighting. One day I came home to find the street cordoned off by the police. It turned out that her children had kidnapped a young boy from the park, and they were holding him hostage inside the house. Theirs was truly a madhouse, and I didn’t want to live near such people.

  Then there was our neighbor, Frances. If anything, her situation was even more unbelievable. Shortly after we’d moved in I found her slumped on her doormat. I stopped to help, half carrying her inside. As I did so I could smell the alcohol on her. She must have remembered my help, for she began calling on us. She was lonely and she wanted someone to talk to, and in our culture we could not refuse hospitality to visitors.

  We invited her in and cooked her meals. She unburdened herself of her life story, and I was shocked beyond words. She had a little two-year-old daughter, and it turned out that girl’s father was her son’s best friend. Four years back she had been married, with two children and a good job. Then she had fallen in love with her twenty-year-old son’s best friend. She started having an affair with him, fell pregnant, and was thrown out and divorced by her husband. He had gotten custody of the children, and she had ended up unemployed and homeless. She’d started drinking and been housed here.

  She told me all of this openly, even speaking in front of Sharif. Such behavior was inconceivable in our culture. It was as if she lived on a different planet to my own. I told her as much. I told her that she had put herself in the fire by her own actions. How could she have done this? Had she lost her mind? She said that it wasn’t so unusual in British culture. People might be married but they’d always be having affairs. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.

  Frances kept dropping by. We couldn’t be unwelcoming, even though half the time she was blind drunk. Part of me was concerned for her and I wanted to help. Each time we would cook her some food and try to cheer her up. Eventually, Sharif made a peephole in our door. Whenever she came around and I couldn’t face her I just didn’t open up. I felt bad doing so—it was wrong in our culture—but I just couldn’t keep inviting her into our lives.

  One morning Sharif went out to buy some bread for breakfast. Frances had been around the previous night and she had eaten us out of house and home. He was away for ages, and I wondered what might have kept him. I went down to put out the garbage, and as I did so I caught sight of two policemen just across the street. They were speaking with Sharif. I felt a bolt of panic shoot through me as the nearest took something shiny out of his pocket. An instant later he had handcuffed himself to my husband.

  Oh my God! What was happening? Where were they taking Sharif? Where were they taking him?

  I dashed across the road. “What’s happening? What’re you doing?”

  The policeman stared at me for a second. “Sorry, love, but we’ve been told to take him . . . Who’re you, anyway?”

  “He’s my husband. . . . But why are you taking him? What for?”

  The other policeman pulled out a notebook and pen. “First off, love, we’ll need your full name and date of birth.”

  I told him. He made a radio call to check that I was who I said I was. Then they explained that they were taking Sharif to the police station. They had spoken with the Home Office, and my husband was slated for immediate deportation to Sudan.

  “Look, I know this is tough on you, love,” the policeman added. “But it isn’t easy for us either. We’re just doing our job.”

  A car pulled alongside and Sharif was bundled inside. The policeman scribbled down the address of the police station and handed it to me.

  “Bring any personal effects,” the policeman told me. “Anything he might want—a change of clothes, that sort of thing.”

  As the car pulled away Sharif was gazing out of the window at me. I realized that I hadn’t even been given the chance to say goodbye.

  I felt the claws of fear tearing at my heart. They had taken Sharif. They had taken him! Surely that was it now? What on earth was I to do? Who could help him now? I thought of Samantha, the nursery school teacher. Surely she would help. I tried calling her, but there was no reply. I felt mounting panic. I was alone on the street, I’d left little Mo in the flat, and Sharif was being sent back to Sudan. What was I to do?

  All of a sudden I thought of David, the man from Aegis Trust. I called his mobile. It rang and rang and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. At the sound of his voice I burst into tears.

  “They’ve taken Sharif!” I wailed. “They’ve taken him. They’re sending him back . . .”

  “Who’s taken him?” David asked. “And why?”

  “The police. They took him just now. I don’t know why. But they’re going to deport him . . .”

  “All right, look, d’you know the address where they’re holding him?”

  I gave David the name of the police station.

  “Okay, this is what we’ll do. First, call your asylum lawyer and ask if there’s anything he can do to stay the deportation. Okay?”

  “Yes, I’ll try.”

  “I’m going to call some press. If I can get them to you, can you go to the police station with them?”

  “Of course. Anything. We have to stop them.”

  “Right, I’ll call you back as soon as I know anymore.”

  The phone went dead. I rushed upstairs to comfort little Mo. I’d heard him crying from the street, and I thanked God that he didn’t know what was happening to his father. Mo was the spitting image of his dad, and he and Sharif were so close. Sharif was very liberated for a Zaghawa man. He would carry little Mo everywhere in his arms, like a proud father. Normally Zaghawa men would leave all that “baby stuff ” to the mother.

  Almost immediately David came back on the phone. He hadn’t been able to raise the BBC, but he’d spoken to Channel 4 News. They had a car on its way to me, complete with a camera crew and a reporter. He couldn’t guarantee it, but he hoped that media pressure might force the Home Office to stay Sharif’s deportation.

  I rushed about getting Mo and myself ready. I was angry now, and I sensed Grandma Sumah’s fiery spirit rising within me. I recognized the Channel 4 team from the last interview. We headed for the police station, whereupon the cameraman set up his equipment on the street—the camera looking directly into the station doorway. The reporter readied herself for action. Together, we walked in with the camera rolling. I caught sight of Sharif sitting in a side room. I pointed him out to the reporter.

  She marched up to the desk and announced who she
was. She had a microphone clipped to her collar, so the sound could be recorded by the camera outside. She demanded to speak with Sharif; and she asked to interview a police spokesperson who might explain to her why they were about to deport a man to a country where his life was in danger.

  “They’re refugees from the war in Darfur,” she said. “I presume you do know what’s happening in Darfur? Several hundred thousand killed, mostly women and children. Millions of refugees . . . Not exactly the nicest of places to send someone back to . . .”

  The police spokesperson said that they were only acting on instructions. He showed us a fax from the Home Office. It ordered Sharif to go to the Reporting Center, from where they would deport him. Strictly speaking Sharif wasn’t under arrest, he said, so they had no problem with him doing an interview. He was allowed out onto the street, where he spoke to the reporter for several minutes about the fearful prospect of being sent back to Sudan. Then I spoke about the trauma and pain of having our family torn apart.

  Eventually, the police told us that Sharif was free to make his own way to the Reporting Center. The Channel 4 crew needed to rush back to the studio, in order to get the story on-air that evening. It was an outrage what they were doing to us, the reporter said, and the story was bound to have a big impact. As for Sharif, he knew what he had to do now. He had no choice but to disappear. He said a hurried goodbye to me there on the street, hugged little Mo tightly, and then he was gone, shouldering his way into the crowd.

  I spoke with David later that day. It turned out that there had been mass arrests all across the country. Darfuris were being held in dozens of locations, pending their deportation to Sudan. Even more worrisome was the legal background to all of this. The House of Lords was about to hear a case arguing whether or not it was safe to return Darfuris to Khartoum. The Home Office were expected to lose, and so it now looked as if they were trying to deport as many of us as they possibly could, before they lost that hearing.

  The only reason that Sharif had managed to escape was because I had a profile in the media, and that gave us a little bit of power. Even so, they hadn’t stopped hunting for him. A week later they came for him again. I was awakened at six in the morning by a hammering on the door. I opened up to find a mixture of policemen in uniforms, and others wearing plainclothes. The plainclothes officers showed me their IDs. They were peering around me into the room, and I knew that they were searching for Sharif.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Who’s here with you?” one of them countered.

  “There’s my son. That’s all.”

  I opened the door wide so they could see into the room. A policewoman in uniform took a couple of steps inside. She caught sight of little Mo fast asleep on the bed. Mo must have felt her eyes on him, for he woke up and started wailing.

  “I’m sorry,” the policewoman said. “The baby . . . D’you mind if I check the other rooms?”

  I shrugged. “There are no other rooms. But go ahead.”

  She poked her head around the corner of the walk-in kitchen and shower. As she did so the plainclothes officers started knocking on the doors of the other flats. I heard them asking if “Mustaffa” was there. I didn’t know if they’d simply got Sharif’s name wrong, or if they were trying to be clever or something. I didn’t really care.

  “Do you know where your husband is?” the policewoman asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t. And his name is Sharif. Sharif. Not Mustaffa.”

  “You’ve no idea where he might be?”

  “I last saw him when he was told to go the Reporting Center. Since that day I haven’t seen him.”

  “And you don’t know where he is now?”

  “I don’t. I would like to know. Sharif is my husband, and the father of my baby.”

  They left, the policewoman apologizing again for disturbing me. I knew that she was just doing her job. She’d tried to be nice to me, and to treat me with respect. The police here were a joy, in comparison to the rapists and murderers that I had faced in Sudan.

  The following morning I went on GMTV. I talked about the way in which my people were being sent back to Sudan to face arrest, torture, and worse. I knew what would happen to them at the hands of the authorities, for look what they had done to me.

  Sharif remained in hiding. I spoke to David regularly, and he told me that the situation was worsening. In some cases whole families were being seized and threatened with deportation. Some had been deported already. David had tracked two Darfuri men to Khartoum, where they had been arrested and tortured. David had managed to get them out of Sudan, to a place where it was safe to record their horrific stories and see the proof of the scars of torture on their bodies. He had fed their stories to the international media. Yet the Home Office was continuing to try to deport people.

  I was angry, and my anger just wouldn’t go away. Sharif was angry, and getting angrier by the day. I spoke to him on his mobile phone. He told me that he was reaching the stage where he wanted to be deported. He hated this country and what it was doing to us, to him. I told him that he couldn’t leave without Mo and me. Either we all would go and face the horror, or we would all stay. But he wasn’t going back there alone.

  For two months Sharif remained in hiding, and then the House of Lords issued its judgment. The Home Office had lost, the Lords ruling that Khartoum was not a safe place to return Darfuri asylum seekers to. The deportations had to cease. I called Sharif. I gave him the news. For now at least he was safe. He could return to us. He could come back to me and little Mo. For now at least we could be a family again.

  I sat Mo on my lap and jiggled him up and down. I told him that at last his father was coming home. I sang a little song for him. It was what my parents had sung to me when I was still a child.

  Come here my love,

  I have a song for you.

  Come here my love,

  I have a dream for you . . .

  EPILOGUE

  Every night after I finished working on this book, I would go to bed in my one-room flat in London and see in my dreams all the people who had died. I saw the fields of dead children. The rape victims. The burned villages. The slaughter. I saw the dead of my family, my loved ones.

  During my darkest moments I concluded that for those who had died, life had perhaps dealt them the better hand—for the living have to live with the memories and the trauma every day, for the rest of their lives. The survivors are forced to live every day with the dark and empty holes where much-loved fathers, brothers, and mothers used to be.

  For me, the scars run deep and will take years to heal.

  One day as I was writing, a police helicopter circled overhead. It was obviously tracking someone. With the repeated thud-thud-thud of the rotor blades, I started to become increasingly frightened.

  I covered my ears with my hands and curled up in the chair. I became increasingly panicked. “It’s inside my head . . . inside my head . . . deep inside my head . . .” I kept repeating. I was back in the hell of the day when the helicopter gunships attacked my village, followed by the murderous Janjaweed militia.

  For the wider victims of the Darfur conflict it will take lifetimes for the trauma to heal—that’s if it ever will.

  It is now almost six years since the conflict in Darfur began. Some 400,000 people have died in the conflict in Darfur, and more than 2.5 million have been forced into vast, chaotic refugee camps—which in themselves are places of hopelessness and suffering.

  Time after time, the world has been alerted to the slaughter and the rape and the horror. The word “genocide” has been used, and the phrase “never again” has been repeatedly heard on the lips of world leaders. But what has actually been done to stop the slaughter?

  No one should underestimate the severity of the situation in Darfur.

  The following are quotes from highly authoritative sources from 2007 and early 2008, concerning the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

  The United Nations Human
itarian Coordinator for Sudan, Manuel Aranda da Silva, said this about Darfur: “The situation is worse than it has ever been. . . . The violence and the threat to humanitarian workers continues unabated.”

  United Nations World Food Program spokesperson Simon Crittle reported that: “The humanitarian situation in Darfur remains absolutely critical. At any time we could face a catastrophe if the security situation gets worse than it is already.”

  A spokesperson for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders/ MSF), which has more than 2,000 staff on the ground in Darfur, stated that: “It is very difficult for aid workers to move outside the camps, which means it is hard to do exploratory missions to areas where there is need. The situation is very bad and is not getting better.”

  Aid agency Danish Church Aid concluded that: “We continue to work in Darfur despite the worsening security situation . . . The situation in Sudan’s Western Darfur province is worsening by the day.”

  British aid agency Oxfam spokesperson Alun Macdonald declared that Darfur: “is certainly the most dangerous that it has been . . . Every place we work has had a security incident in the last three months. If it gets much worse we would certainly have to consider if we can stay at all.”

  Matthew Conway, the UN’s Chad spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, stated of the humanitarian crisis: “The scale is mind-boggling. Complete desolation and destruction. And the stench, my God, the stench.”

  Commenting on the ethnically targeted violence, Conway concluded: “We are seeing elements that closely resemble what we saw in Rwanda in the genocide of 1994.”

  The UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, gave a briefing to the United Nations Security Council, declaring: “Our entire humanitarian operation in Darfur—the only lifeline for more than three million people—is presently at risk. We need immediate action on the political front to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe with massive loss of life. . . . In short, we may end up with a man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale in Darfur.”