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 brought 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.
By the 1980s, however, his world had ended. Drought, desertification and famine had disrupted the earlier moral geography, and as the great camel herds began to die off from a lack of grazing land, nomads came into conflict with agriculturalists while searching for new pastures. In some cases they attempted to abandon their herds and started to farm as an alternative livelihood, but this met with resistance from already settled populations. Nomadic tribes that would later be identified as ‘Arab’ and associated with the
janjawiid
were, at the outset, also victims.
While conflict mounted internally, exacerbated in part by a changing climate, Darfur was caught in the middle of the geopolitics of Khartoum, Tripoli and N’Djamena. In Khartoum, increasingly Islamist governments took office. A military coup brought Omar al-Bashir to power in 1989 and the regime increasingly defined itself in opposition to the predominantly Christian and animist South, in an ongoing war that left more than two million dead, and promoted a strict adherence to a racialised conception of Islam. At the same time Libya’s dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, embarked on the creation of an ‘Arab belt’ across the Sahara. Central to this geopolitical project was control of Chad. Darfur, which borders both countries, was used as a base by Libyan-backed Chadian militias fighting against the government in the capital N’Djamena. Gaddafi sponsored the establishment of the Islamic Legion, consisting of Chadian rebels and discontented Sahelian Arabs, who were displaced from their lands and livelihoods by drought and local conflict. The Islamic Legion was trained by the Libyan regime in a toxic mix of desert guerilla warfare and a virulent form of Arab supremacism. The defeat of the Islamic Legion in 1988 had a profound impact as its fighters returned to Darfur and formed the Arab Gathering—an armed political movement ostensibly organised to protect the interests of a disadvantaged minority within Sudan, but possessed of weapons, training and an ideology of racial supremacy.
As an ‘Arab’ identity was being cultivated by extremist movements in Tripoli and Khartoum, an ‘African’ identity was also being manufactured. The resistance leader of South Sudan, John Garang, sought to alter the course of the North–South war by enlisting non-Arab tribes (who were a majority of the overall population of Sudan) to a common cause with the South, whose sub-Saharan identity and predominantly Christian religion were more easily identified as ‘African’. This initially had little traction in Darfur, as the early stages of Khartoum’s Islamist turn promised to include all good Muslims—defined by conformity with increasingly strict religious practice rather than by race—in the affairs and rewards of the state.