Is This Your First War? (18 page)

Eventually, inevitably, the janjaweed attacks escalated. Two villages close to Bakinya were burned first. Most people fled alive, but some were killed. A woman who returned to one of the destroyed villages to forage for food was captured and forced to work for the janjaweed, hauling water like a pack animal before she was able to escape a week or two later.

Residents of Bakinya figured they'd be next and decided to flee. Rakit stayed behind with some furniture and valuables to wait for other members of his village to return with donkeys. While they were gone, the janjaweed came. Though nearly seventy, he climbed a tree so he could watch as horsemen swept into the village, spraying bullets through the thatched-roofed huts and then torching them. He had thought his village was deserted, but one woman was too frail to run and was burned to death in her home. “We knew the attackers,” he said. “We even knew their names.”

Several days later Donald, Mohammad, and I accompanied displaced residents of Labotega back to their burned village. UN workers heard warning shots from nearby when they visited a week or so earlier, so this time a pickup truck full of Chadian soldiers came with us. One of the villagers, Matar Mohammad, carried a large sword with him as well.

When we arrived, Labotega was still smouldering. Villagers sifted through the ashes, bullet casings, and smashed clay vessels. Perfect circles of mud brick and black ash scarred the ground where thatched huts had once stood. The raiders had even destroyed metal boxes of chalk and school supplies. They broke open urns full of grain and burned their contents. The villagers had fled in such haste that they were unable to gather the chickens that had once pecked freely in and around the village. Now, these same birds scuttled and darted frenetically in and out of the dried stalks of sorghum that flanked Labotega's smoking ruins.

“There is nothing I can say. I'm so sad,” one of the displaced villagers said, standing in the ash and toppled bricks that had once been his home. “I wanted to see my house again. Maybe there is something for me.” He looked for a sewing machine that one of his wives had hidden but found nothing.

Labotega, a Chadian village attacked and burned by janjaweed. Photo courtesy of Donald Weber.

Matar Mohammad was luckier. He dug through the ash and sandy soil, his massive sword hanging awkwardly over his shoulder in its leather and metal-tipped scabbard. His mother told him she had concealed her valuables under the earth, and soon Mohammad's fingernails scraped against something metal. He scooped more purposely now at the dirt around the object and lifted into the sunlight. There were two pots, one stacked inside the other, and inside the smaller pot, carefully wrapped in clear plastic, three bars of soap. He looked pleased.

“
Salam alaikum
.” Peace be with you.

“
Alaikum salam
.” And also with you.

“How are you?”

“Well.
Hamdullah
.” Thanks to God.

“And you?”

“I'm fine.
Hamdullah
.”

“And your family?”

“They are well.
Hamdullah
.”

“Yours?”

“Good.
Hamdullah
.”

Mohammad, our translator, was making introductions to a man of about thirty-five wearing a long white tunic and a tight-fitting, brimless
kufi
cap in the sandy yard outside Goz Beida's hospital. Around him, sitting under whatever shade they could find, or cooking over small gas stoves, were the less-seriously wounded victims of janjaweed attacks or their family members. The really badly hurt were inside, where there was not nearly enough room for everyone who needed care.

Every time Mohammad met someone new, the initial conversations were identical. There were the ritual greetings, inquiries about family, thanks to God. Then Mohammad would reveal the family and tribe, originally from Darfur, to which he belonged. A connection and trust would be established, and we could begin a real discussion. In this case, the man with the kufi cap was Adam Daoud Gammar, a member of the Dajo tribe who lived in the village of Miramanege, near the border with Sudan. His village and tribe were black, as were many of the nearby settlements. Arab tribes lived among them or passed through, grazing their animals. If relations were not harmonious, they were at least stable, Arabs and blacks trading with each other. This stopped in 2003 when outright war erupted in Darfur.

“In the beginning, the Arabs didn't kill us unless we fought back. They only took our cattle,” Gammar said. “Men from my village and others formed groups to protect ourselves and retrieve our cows. Twice, we followed our stolen animals into Sudan. Another time we attacked the Arab raiders. There were fifty-seven of us Dajo. We killed six Arabs with our bows and spears. They had cloaked their faces, but when we uncovered them, we recognized who they were. They were well known. They lived with us.”

Revenge came during Ramadan, a few weeks before we met. Arab raiders attacked Gammar's village. Some forty horsemen rode into Miramanege, while others surrounded it. “First they killed or captured those of us in the village, then they went after us in the fields, chasing down fleeing villagers on horseback.” Gammar said. When it was over, seven were dead and twenty-one, including Adam, captured.

“They tied our hands behind our backs and led us to a nearby Arab village, pulling us by the ropes that bound us together. They began hauling away groups of five, but not so far that the rest of us couldn't watch. The Arabs shot them one by one. If the gun jammed, or if the bullet didn't kill the victim right away, they took sticks, stones, anything at all, and they beat them until they were dead.”

Gammar watched ten of his fellow villagers murdered this way. All the while he tugged and strained against the ropes binding his wrists and finally loosened his bonds. When his captors came to take Gammar and those bound to him to their deaths, he slipped free and bolted. The horsemen charged after him but could not manoeuvre quickly around the thatched huts. Gammar zigged and zagged. The men on horseback shouted and wheeled their animals in tight circles. Gammar heard shots as he cleared the village. He plunged into a field of sorghum and ran, disappearing among the tall dry stalks that reached well over his head and hid him from his pursuers.

Gammar came back later that evening with local police. They quickly found fifteen bodies, and for a more a moment Gammar allowed himself to hope that the final five had somehow escaped as well. Then they saw thick tracks through the sand where something heavy had been dragged. The janjaweed had put ropes around the necks of the final five Dajo and dragged them behind their horses until they died. When Gammar found their bodies, some were missing their heads. Janjaweed, hiding behind cover some distance away, shot at him and the police as they tried to bury the dead. The police shot back, surprising the janjaweed, who were expecting only more black tribesmen with spears. The janjaweed ran away.

Gammar moved to the village of Koloy, where some 5,000 Dajo and members of other black tribes had gathered for protection. Janjaweed marauded through the desert outside the village. There was a water pump nearby. Women sent there to fetch water were often raped. But at least in Koloy Gammar was reunited with his uncle, Abdullah Idriss, who had fled his own village of Modoyna, which had also been attacked and burned. Idriss rode a donkey back to the village a few days after Gammar arrived to see if he could recover anything from the smoking ruins. While he was gone, janjaweed on horseback and camels attacked Koloy. Many of those living there saw them coming and ran or hid, but Idriss, away for the day, didn't know what had happened. The janjaweed saw Idriss before he saw them and charged after him on horseback. Idriss jumped off his donkey and ran. The janjaweed opened fire. Gammar, hidden nearby, watched everything.

“None of the bullets hit him,” he said. “It was because of the holy amulet he was wearing. So they chased him down on their horses, running over him and knocking him to the ground. Six men leaped on top of him. One held down each arm and leg. Another held his face to the sky to force him to watch. But when one of the janjaweed pointed his gun at my uncle and pulled the trigger, nothing happened. His amulet was still protecting him. Abdullah knew the men who held him down. Two were from black tribes that had joined with the Arabs. Abdullah called to them by name, begging them to stop. But the man with the rifle removed its bayonet. He kneeled on my uncle's chest and used the knife to dig out both of his eyes.”

Gammar took us into the hospital to see his uncle. The rooms and hallways were crowded but swept and mopped. Men lay on cots, metal bedpans on the floor nearby. Relatives, mostly women, held the ends of the long, brightly coloured lengths of cloth in which they wrapped their bodies and waved them back and forth above the faces of their sick and wounded loved ones, stirring the air and keeping away flies. We found Abdullah Idriss on his cot beneath a mosquito net. His wife, Mariam, sat at the foot of the bed, along with their two children, Bushra, five, and Yasin, two. Idriss said little. His wife said nothing. She looked overcome with despair, traumatized and in shock. It was difficult to imagine how Idriss might support her and their two young children. Their futures were not promising before the attack and now must have loomed before her as something so bleak as to be overwhelming. When Abdullah Idriss's mother heard what had happened to him, she too needed to be hospitalized.

“Before all this, Abdullah was happy and lived a normal life,” his nephew, Adam Daoud Gammar, said. “He had cows, and he had good relations with everybody. Maybe now he would be better off dead.”

Throughout our time in the southeast of Chad, Mohammad had been in touch with SLA commanders fighting inside Darfur. They were on the move, travelling long distances, but were most active hundreds of kilometres to the north, across the border from Bahai and the Oure Cassoni refugee camp. There was space on a World Food Program flight that could take us there by way of Abéché. We broke down our tents, rolled up our sleeping bags, and stuffed everything into backpacks and duffle bags. There wasn't much to carry. Weight restrictions on UN flights meant that none of us had more than fifteen kilograms of gear, including laptops, satellite phones, and cameras. Our driver would take our vehicle back to Abéché himself and leave it there. We'd find other transportation in Bahai. It was too far and too dangerous to ask him to drive there.

We arrived in Abéché late morning and were in Bahai an hour or so later, landing on a strip of gravel with only desert as far as we could see in every direction. There was nothing green anywhere. The ground was not flat, though, so horizons were actually closer than they first appeared. There were gently rising hills, valleys, dried wadis, and patches of sand too soft to drive on. It was dangerous to get stuck here. Robberies were frequent, and someone had been shot shortly before we arrived. The border was less than a kilometre away, unguarded. We caught a ride on the back of a pickup truck to the town of Bahai, which was really little more than a village of mud brick buildings with a large market nearby. A UNHCR outpost had been set up, and we were invited to stay there. It was walled, with a guard at the gate. There was a latrine and a wash station with intermittent water, and a low-slung concrete building. Several of the rooms were empty, and Donald, Mohammad, and I were given space to sleep indoors, along with Italian photographer Marco Di Lauro, and Bo Søndergaard and Jan Grarup, a Danish writer-photographer team.

The Oure Cassoni refugee camp. Photo courtesy of Donald Weber.

Mohammad and I spent the afternoon talking to SLA members in the Oure Cassoni camp, and, by satellite phone, with those across the border in Darfur. Bahai had a slightly anarchic feel to it. There was no visible security presence other than the armed men employed by aid agencies to keep their compounds safe. The market — a ramshackle collection of stalls and narrow alleys — was always crowded but there wasn't much buying and selling going on. The available food, other than onions and garlic, was mostly dried or canned and had come from far away. One vendor sold leather wallets bearing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.