Deep Field (11 page)

By 2000, however, it appeared that this offer was a sham. When Bashir took power in 1989, he replaced this inclusive version of Islam with one that emphasised the primacy of his own and Khartoum’s Arabised elite. The regime in Khartoum did not invest its resources in Darfur as had been promised and the Darfurian opposition produced a ‘Black Book’ that documented this systematic political and economic neglect along racial lines. In this context, John Garang’s offer of ‘African’ or ‘non-Arab’ solidarity took on greater political appeal. In 2003, two Darfuri opposition groups—the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)—united and attacked a government base in El Fasher to instigate armed opposition to the regime in Khartoum. Already massively in debt and fully committed to the war with South Sudan, Bashir responded to this new threat by exploiting Darfur’s already ideologically radicalised and alienated groups to create ruthless local militias prepared to kill for money and land: the
janjawiid
. This was, Alex de Waal has written, ‘counter-insurgency on the cheap’ and represented a radically different, nightmare world from that in which the eighty-year old Sheikh Hilal had grown up and in which his son, Musa Hilal, was to become one of the most vicious protagonists.
²

My field notes from this time recorded, in terse shorthand form, this radicalisation of the war in Darfur and reflected a complex society that had collapsed from both external and internal pressure. As we travelled further and further into Darfur, passing burned out villages and interviewing people hiding in dry wadis (seasonal rivers) or around clumps of trees, fearing attack from the passing Antonov, my notes became increasingly cryptic. In handwriting shaky from the road, smudged with dust and sweat, a grim record of people’s marginal survival was scratched into the page. An ‘X’ in every village indicted the last attack, while number and downward arrows indicated the levels of population decline. This survey of living conditions ceased to reflect any individuality of person or location and assumed instead an almost bland sameness that emerged from the shorthand of destruction:

Last X 3 months ago. No food, some berries. Water 6hrs by donkey. Living in forest, animals stolen. Families separated.
Majority killed in X. Currently living in Wadi. Water holes bombed/pumps destroyed. Ongoing JJ [janjawiid] attacks.
Primary/Secondary displacement. Push factors. Antonov seen yesterday at 4pm—live in constant expectation of attack.

-
Shardaba

-
Songoli

-
Gurbuhir

-
Sonjabak……… Empty/destroyed

-
Argao

-
Urubukir

GoS [Government of Sudan] harassment—women at risk when collecting water. Seven women from this village have disappeared. Access to water 6 hours by donkey. In nearby Ana Bagi, 4 girls had recently disappeared because of attacks by the GoS forces.

Orschi—attack on school 3 months ago also problem of being near the main road which is controlled by GoS and JJ—animals looted and now no access to markets. Living in forests on seeds and berries and staple millet They might eat meat every 2-3 months, but have given us one of their goats for dinner. In Inni, there are attacks every week. Last week the JJ took 62 cows and 5 camels. JJ kill/loot.

Gita—Evidence of malnutrition—no agriculture, no animals.
Former land now a JJ base and the village and families have become separated and many still lost.

Hilalia. The Antonov attacked one week ago, and people are now living in the forest. They had been in camps in Chad but were also attacked here on a weekly basis by Chadian rebels and the camp itself was located in an unstable area with little water. They are safer here than in the camp although things are clearly difficult. The water well was bombed and daily water collection takes 5 hours by donkey—a task that is done by the women. The SLA control the area so, currently, this is relatively safe. But—there is a nearby GoS position and one week ago a village woman was kidnapped and raped. There was SLA ‘retribution’ and ‘an exchange’ between GoS and the SLA at the water point. The wells, however, are only full during the rainy season and dry up during the summer. Food is also scarce and the villagers are dependent on food from camps in Chad
where some are still registered or through extended family/tribal connections—5 days away by donkey. Food collection is also a women’s task.

Haramumba—fearing constant attacks water is collected at night.

Ana Bagi—located near GoS checkpoint on a hill: a constant threat. There was a rape ten days ago.

As Darfur fades from the headlines, overshadowed by the independence of South Sudan, and official assertions from the US, the UK and the UN that the situation has ‘stabilised’, the destruction of this starkly beautiful desert society continues. While the killing and displacement reached their peak in 2004 and have declined since, the Antonov still flies. The situation is perhaps more complex as, in addition to state-sponsored violence, the Darfuri rebel groups have begun to turn on each other and unity is further away than ever. But Darfur remains a marginalised part of North Sudan—still governed by a military elite and underpinned by a profoundly racist ideology. Despite ICC indictments Bashir remains in charge, uncensured by other African leaders and in control in a capital still booming from oil revenues. Aid agencies remain on the ground providing vital supplies for the nearly four million people who have been displaced, but this task is routinely made almost impossible by the regime’s total lack of cooperation and is still overseen by the ICC-indicted Humanitarian Aid Commission. Peace for Darfuris—as for other minorities within this ideologised rump state of North Sudan—remains as elusive as ever. And what has been lost, apart from hundreds of thousands of lives, is a society whose fusion of Arab and African cultures representing East and West, Saharan and sub-Saharan, animist and Muslim, may well be impossible to restore. As another old sheikh lamented, a few days from his own eightieth birthday:

The Arabs came here looking for pasture, and when the grass was finished they went back. They used up our grass, but they took good care of the gardens and the people. There were no robberies, no thieves, no revolution. No one thought of domination, everyone was safe … Now there is nothing but trouble all over Sudan. There is no government, no control. Look around you. What do you see? No women, only armed men. We no longer recognize it, this land of ours.
³

For Orwell, history notionally ended in the 1930s with the defeat of Republican Spain. Seventy years later, a history of pluralism and relatively peaceful accommodation has ended in Darfur in a parallel world of extremist ideologies and the inhuman calculus of political power.

¹
quoted in J Flint & A de Waal,
Darfur: A New History of a Long War
, Zed Books, London, 2008.

²
A de Waal, ‘Counter-insurgency on the cheap’,
London Review of Books
26 (15), August 2004.

³
Sheikh Heri Rahma quoted in J Flint & A de Waal,
Darfur: A New History of a Long War
, Zed Books, London, 2008, p. 276.

IT IS STRANGE,
the rituals that we find ourselves carrying out before the unknown—detached acts, learned by rote, and made solemn by the occasion. I shaved not once but three times, showered twice, arranged my books first by content, then by colour, then by size. I put on the cleanest of clean clothes—a red shirt, blue trousers, grey desert boots—and stepped out of my dark concrete room onto the street and into the dust of El Fasher.

Outside our compound we were engaged in silent activity, making final preparations for the mission. Conversation was pared back to what was strictly necessary—all the more lucid and eloquent for its truncated, listlike form: ballistics blanket, full medical kit, small medical kit, run bag, 180 litres of petrol, camp beds, water, food, fire extinguishers, sat phone, HF radio, VHF radio, radio call-sign list, travel authorisation, GPS, white and blue flags. Body bags were stored under the back seat of the Toyota Land Cruiser Troop Carrier—a large and highly prized car known throughout Darfur for its speed, agility and long desert range. A car used by aid workers and coveted by killers. Take off the roof, attach a machine gun and you have a ‘technical’—a makeshift instrument of war capable of striking deep into the continent. We called it the Buffalo, and with its dual fuel tanks, power and relatively light weight, it could cover 1000 kilometres without refuelling. With this car, the chance of attack and hijacking increased, and we had four of them and 100 kilometres of sand, scrub and stone before us—a lawless area known as the Janjaweed Damra. The instructions were simple in this flat no man’s land whose aridity was starkly etched in dried-up water courses and burnt-out villages.
Drive as fast as you can.

That, and our rituals. All glowed and squeaked with cleanliness. Beards were neatly trimmed, white robes shone against the sand and sky, the cars were freshly polished and the light-blue flags of the United Nations flew high. Each bound tight around his arm Koranic inscriptions impressed on leather pouches. Allah, the merciful, the compassionate—keep away the bullets.

The night before, in a small coffee shop, the mission’s leadership—the security officer, the logistics officer and I—made our final preparations. Everything had been done, the cars stocked and fuelled, fuel dumps prearranged. We had hundreds of forms: forms for assessment, forms for recording, forms for observing. All the bureaucracy for inscribing the needs and living conditions of people living in fear, scared of attack, on the move. Administration for the displaced. I thought I had trained for this, ‘skilled-up’, prepared. In Pakistan I had seen living cities reduced to knee-high rubble; frontier lands where peasant farmers in mud-brick villages were attacked by soldiers of the state, their lands laid waste. Darfur was our responsibility, our Spain. And so we sat in the coffee hut and spoke and in our final preparation raised the questions only our rituals could answer.

We started, a convoy of white and blue weaving like tracers through the desert. We maintained a tight line of sight and constant radio contact, fanning out to avoid the blinding dust of the car in front. There was a strict protocol where the most important positions were the lead and the tail, a defensive formation to protect the cars in between. Together, in convoy, watching. We communicated in terse radio form, constantly checking and rechecking our positions:
Mobile Four, Mobile One—are you with us, over
. Behind us came the vehicle belonging to a lone NGO—outside the UN security arrangements, behind the convoy. Before we left I went for a final security briefing. ‘They go for the last car,’ I had been told. ‘If anything happens, don’t stop. They’re nice guys, but they’re not your responsibility.’

But they were—the colour of our flags conferred status, an implication of government, a suggestion of international authority. In the lead car, my white skin had ceased to be my own and, like the flags above, had been lent to the mission as a guarantee of safety.

I was in the lead and I was the least knowledgeable about this land. When I had flown over it in the Cessna it had seemed to me to be a landscape of unparalleled bleakness. I had spent the last two years among the soft colours, streams and tucked-away hamlets of Pakistan’s mountainous north. Sudan was a murderous counterpoint. In that desert, I could not survive. I could not read the land or determine a path. My electronic compass simply showed empty space intersected 1000 kilometres to the north by a straight line and the word
Libya
. My notebooks were a list of twelve-digit map coordinates, measuring degrees, feet and inches east and north, no names or places. Before I left I had seen a political map of Darfur—amorphous colours shifting and blending into one another as alliances broke down, opposition movements split, and government favourites charted their own course. The open skies and desert space were strangely and intensely claustrophobic and as we drove, my eyes strained, searching the country for checkpoints and militia factions.

And soon enough, we saw the checkpoint—in the distance a little nest of rocket launchers poked over half a dozen sandbags in the sun. I had not seen it, there were no markings, but it commanded the track and marked a random pocket of political control in the sand. Black soldiers from the South, bought and brought by Khartoum, armed by Russia, funded by Chinese oil investments to man an outpost in Darfur. Soldiers of the Government of Sudan.

At speed we continued, and amid the churning dust we passed deserted hut after deserted hut where the remains of villages had been left gradually to collapse. I saw the black, charred outline of houses burned indelibly into the ground. I shouted at the driver after some subterranean feud over precedence caused him to clip the tail of the car in front—the surrounding desolation slowly eating its way into our small party. Here, I was told, was the school for boys—a roofless, bullet-ridden building of handmade brick. There, was the girls’ school—an inferior wooden structure marked by nothing now except a few small pieces of charcoal.