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Sudan

Chronicle of a Massacre Foretold

By Thilo Thielke

Africa's largest nation is being consumed by a civil war that has already claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands. But despite the obvious crisis, the international community continues to drag its feet and refuses to intervene. A large portion of Sudan's troubled Darfur region is now controlled by rebels.

When disaster struck Khor Abeche, the town's mayor, Mohammed Abakir, 52, was sitting with his second wife, Mariam Adam, in front of his house in the eastern portion of the town drinking tea. It was probably what saved their lives. It was six a.m., the rising sun was just beginning to warm the earth after a cold night, and a light wind was driving desert sand between the town's straw huts. It was then that an inferno was unleashed at the opposite side of town.

Camouflaged fighters emerged from the morning haze to the West, marching on the town of about 20,000, followed by bands of Arab Janjaweed militias, bearing down on Khor Abeche on their camels and horses like hordes of apocalyptic riders. A third wave, consisting of pickups and large trucks, brought soldiers armed with heavy machine guns and bazookas.

Dozens of huts were set on fire within minutes, sending out clouds of dark smoke that foreshadowed the horror that was to descend on Khor Abeche on April 7, 2005.

Abakir, seeing the billowing smoke, grabbed Mariam and their children and ran as fast as he could into the hilly plains on the outskirts of town. After assaulting Khor Abeche from three directions, the attackers quickly surrounded the town, unleashing a fire storm and slaughtering everyone in their path -- men, women and children.

Abakir and his family survived by hiding in a cave, where they spent the entire day listening to the sounds of Khor Abeche being destroyed: the roar of artillery, rounds from Kalashnikov rifles, exploding bombs dropped from the Sudanese army's Antonov aircraft -- and the piercing screams of the dying. The sounds of the massacre continued until about 4 p.m., when an eerie stillness descended on the town in Sudan's troubled southern Darfur region.

It was at about this time that terrified cowherder Feisal Mohammed Wadi, 18, was sitting crouched behind a boulder in the countryside near Khor Abeche. He had just driven a herd of cattle out of town the day before in the hope of finding at least some half-withered grass in the rocky area. He slept outside with his herd that night, which may have saved his life.

As soon as calm seemed to have returned and a helicopter bearing the logo of the African Union (AU) flew across the devastated town, Wadi emerged from his hiding place and crept back into Khor Abeche. For a while he wandered helplessly among the ruins of mud huts. Only after stumbling upon the bullet-riddled corpses of his father and uncle in front of the family's demolished house did he gradually understand what had happened.

In a long series of massacres in the Darfur region, between the southern Sahara and the Gazelle River, Khor Abeche is the most recent town to be leveled by Janjaweed militias and Sudanese government troops. Those of the town's black African inhabitants -- members of the Saghawa, Massalit, Birgid and Tunjur tribes -- who didn't manage to flee were massacred.

When rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), which is battling the regime in Khartoum, arrived a short time later they found a ghost town. About 80 percent of the dwellings had been torched, most of the wells were destroyed and clay water jugs were shattered.

Even the poorly equipped hospital, managed by a French doctor until a few days before the attack, had been looted and lay in ruins. Four patients who were apparently too weak to flee the attackers had been slaughtered like cattle.

The refuge camp on the outskirts of town was also empty. It had provided shelter and protection against constant terror in Darfur to about 12,000 refugees -- at least until the terror caught up with them again. They've been hiding in the savannah ever since, where many will die a slow death in a region where daytime temperatures climb above 50°C (120°F) and nights are bitterly cold. The sparse, thorny acacia trees dotting the landscape offer little shade, and water has been scarce for a long time. Aid convoys have yet to reach the area since that bloody April day.

Has the international community failed Sudan?

But what the survivors of the Khor Abeche massacre have to report isn't just the chronicle of inevitable death. It's also the shameful and practically incomprehensible account of a global community that has done virtually nothing to intervene. The world knows exactly what's happening in western Sudan, but hasn't taken any serious steps to intervene and put a stop to the conflict between the Arab Islamist central government in Khartoum, together with its Janjaweed helpers, and the primarily black African population in the poverty-stricken western portion of Africa's largest country (by land mass).

Civil war is fast becoming entrenched in Darfur, much as it did before in southern Sudan where, after more than two decades of atrocities and 2 million deaths, a peace agreement was finally signed this January.

Black African tribes make up the majority of southern Sudan's population, whereas the north is primarily Arab. And even though the country's oil wells are in the south, most of the profits have traditionally been funneled to the Arab north, creating a climate of hatred and resentment. But the rebellion against Khartoum was also an expression of resistance to Sharia, the Islamic law that the country's radical Muslim regime wanted to use to quell resistance throughout the country, even in the non-Muslim southern regions.

In contrast to the Christians and animists in southern Sudan, Darfur's African tribes are Muslims, whose conversion to the Koran began centuries ago. Many ethnic groups have been living in the region for generations, farming millet and sorghum. Those who raise cattle, however, are forced to live a nomadic life, because of Darfur's often barren soil.

In the last 20 years, droughts and desertification have gradually reduced pastureland, leading to growing rivalries between crop and cattle farmers. The conflicts became all the more explosive because many camel and cattle nomads have gradually come to identify themselves as Arabs, and no longer as Africans.

The government in Khartoum took advantage of these tensions to further its own interests, and began arming the nomads in the 1980s. The former "spear-carrying oxen knights," as ethnologist and Sudan expert Bernhard Streck has dubbed the nomads, had thrived on the slave trade for centuries. Once it became defunct, they began pushing southward where the soil was more fertile. By as early as 1991, the invaders caused such havoc in Darfur that the Sudan Democratic Gazette called it a "genocide-like attack."

The roots of the conflict

The struggle over water and pasture intensified in the 1990s, when the government of President Omar al-Bashir decided to promote the Arabization of Darfur. Government troops in helicopters soon began firing on villages and farms, and the Janjaweed were given license to kill. In February 2003, when rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army and their allies took up arms to defend themselves against what had become constant attacks, a violent civil war erupted.

What began as a rivalry over natural resources has since turned into a war of attrition. The US State Department has long since classified what it calls the "crimes against humanity" committed in Darfur as genocide. Amnesty International speaks of "unlawful murders of civilians, torture, rape, abduction and destruction of villages and property." Both a British government commission and various aid organizations estimate that between 180,000 and 400,000 people have lost their lives since early 2003. Of a former Darfur population of about 6 million, 2 million are now wasting away in hopelessly overcrowded refugee camps. Another 200,000 refugees have fled to nearby Chad.

And still no one intervenes. Everyone -- the United Nations, the European Union, the United States -- is calling Darfur the African Union's problem. The Africans, for their part, are complicating matters by insisting that they should have the sole mandate for resolving the conflict -- and they're charging hefty sums for the privilege.

The European Union alone has contributed €92 million. The Germans gave another €3 million and communications equipment worth €100,000. At a donor conference in May, Canada and the United States announced a joint commitment to contribute $184 million to Darfur. But the African Union has done little to solve the problems of Darfur. It claims that it needs the whopping sum of $460 million to triple the number of AU peacekeepers in Darfur to 8,000, and almost three-quarters of a billion dollars to expand its force to 12,000 by next year.

Meanwhile, both the AU's crippling inactivity and the world community's wait-and-see attitude are costing more and more lives in Darfur -- lives that could have been saved, in places like Khor Abeche.