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For a Small Girl in Darfur, A Year of Fear and Flight
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 26, 2004; Page A01
NERA, Sudan -- For the past month, Halima Ali's home has been a patch of sand under the shady branches of an acacia tree. Before that, it was a twig and grass hut in a makeshift camp eight miles north. Before that, it was a bush draped with a charred blanket.
Five times in the past 14 months, this slight girl of 10 has stuffed her belongings -- frilly pink dress, teapot, straw prayer mat -- into a burlap sack and fled, along with her family, to temporary refuge. Repeatedly, they have put down roots, only to hurriedly yank them up and flee just ahead of marauding militiamen and rebels.
Displaced children mill about in the Nera camp. The violence in Darfur has driven families away from their farmlands and children away from their schools.
"She's small, she doesn't know anything yet," said Halima's mother, pausing to comfort the despondent girl as the family set up camp in this sandy field.
"I do know," Halima said quietly, and began to tell their tale.
More than any other hardship, more than hunger and sickness and violence, the 22-month conflict in Sudan's Darfur region has been a crisis of people in flight. Since the early spring of 2003, more than 1.5 million people have been driven from their farmland by conflict, forced to abandon the millet and wheat and watermelon patches tilled by their forefathers and head into the unknown.
The forced exodus is part of a wider, government-backed effort to remove Africans from their land and give nomadic Arabs, who are allied with the Arab-dominated Khartoum government, more room to graze their cattle, according to the United Nations and human rights advocates. A drought has dried the Arabs' land, and they are pushing farther south, into traditional African territory.
As the Arab Janjaweed militias ravage the region, African rebel groups have fought back in an increasingly aggressive campaign to defend their lands and challenge Arab political dominance. Darfur's villagers are caught in the crossfire.
African farmers and Arab herders have engaged in sporadic violence for years, but no one can remember a time when so many people were driven from their homes. In less than two years, the new conflict has virtually eradicated African village life in Darfur, a rugged region the size of France, and there are growing fears that it may never be restored.
Until spring 2003, Darfur was a labyrinth of straw-roofed, igloo-shaped structures known as tukuls and markets where women hunched over stools preparing tiny cups of inky coffee and selling pyramids of tomatoes and onions. Now, the terrain has become a wasteland of decapitated huts, bomb craters, vacant markets and children's charred flip-flops abandoned in the sand.
Many homeless families have taken up extended residence in dozens of camps scattered across Darfur, but others have been forced to move repeatedly.
Halima's family reached the acacia tree after a year-long odyssey of repeated escapes from mayhem. They arrived Oct. 11, fleeing with a dozen others from a refugee camp after an attack there by Janjaweed fighters left nine people dead and the health clinic looted.
Now, on a hot stretch of scrubby field, the refugees are trying to reknit the shattered rhythms of their daily life: a farmer grieving over his brother's murder, a little girl missing the taste of cow's milk, and a century-old blind man longing for the land his family had tilled for 17 generations.
Sept. 9, 2003
Ta'asha to Bashom
Mohamed Adam Mohamed and his family had just finished taking their customary 10:30 a.m. breakfast of sweet tea and millet porridge with okra sauce, a dish known as asida, when they heard shots. Mohamed looked out of his hut and saw men on horses and camels stampeding through their village, Ta'asha. There were huts on fire and voices shouting, "Slaves, get off the land!"
"We had heard this was happening in other places," recalled Mohamed, his round face somber beneath a gray turban. "We grabbed some blankets, water jugs and cooking pots and ran into the bush."
By 6 p.m., 22 villages in the area were aflame. The family hid behind thorns and high grass, hunkered in the hot sand.
"We had to be silent," Mohamed recalled. "I just kept praying for the children not to cry. The most important thing was to save my family. The rest we could grow again."
When the marauders withdrew, the men ventured back. Halima, Mohamed's young cousin, tugged on his long white robe. She wanted to go, too. Her father was missing, and her mother was crying hysterically.
Mohamed gently held her back, and later he was grateful for his decision. The sight awaiting him was worse than he had imagined.
All five family huts were burned, and 30 men were dead. Among them, Mohamed found the bodies of his brother and his uncle Hamis -- Halima's father.
Hamis was 40 and the father of seven. His body was slumped under the ruins of his burned mud and straw hut. He had two bullet wounds, one in the chest and one in the head. In an abandoned hut nearby, five girls huddled motionless, smeared with dirt and blood. They had been raped by the attackers, Mohamed said.
"I was feeling so angry," he said. "I was praying to God for the first time in my life that I too could have a weapon. But I had nothing."
That day, in the smoldering village, Mohamed buried two men with whom he had grown up, shared wedding ceremonies and farmed in the thorn fields nearly every day of his adult life. There was no time to wrap the bodies in white sheets and bury them in wood coffins, as Islamic tradition requires.
Instead, the survivors gathered around two dirt mounds and recited the Islamic prayer for the dead: "God bless them. Take their souls to paradise. Keep them among good people."
With her little brother strapped to her back, Halima left Ta'asha and walked for three hours in the darkness until the family reached Bashom, a market village near the regional capital, Nyala.
Sept. 29, 2003
Bashom to Ta'asha
For the next 20 days, they camped under a cluster of trees. The village elder in Bashom, a blind man named Abakar Yusuf who estimated his age at 119, instructed the villagers to collect grains and donate them to the newcomers.
"We are all from the same tribe, the Dago, and many of us are even relatives," Yusuf said in a raspy voice. He held court from his sagging bed, his frail and useless legs poking out like toothpicks from beneath his robe. Not much shocked him anymore, he said, but he never could have imagined what was taking place in Darfur.
cont'd at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13248-2004Nov25.html?nav=lb&sub=AR
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 26, 2004; Page A01
NERA, Sudan -- For the past month, Halima Ali's home has been a patch of sand under the shady branches of an acacia tree. Before that, it was a twig and grass hut in a makeshift camp eight miles north. Before that, it was a bush draped with a charred blanket.
Five times in the past 14 months, this slight girl of 10 has stuffed her belongings -- frilly pink dress, teapot, straw prayer mat -- into a burlap sack and fled, along with her family, to temporary refuge. Repeatedly, they have put down roots, only to hurriedly yank them up and flee just ahead of marauding militiamen and rebels.
Displaced children mill about in the Nera camp. The violence in Darfur has driven families away from their farmlands and children away from their schools.
"She's small, she doesn't know anything yet," said Halima's mother, pausing to comfort the despondent girl as the family set up camp in this sandy field.
"I do know," Halima said quietly, and began to tell their tale.
More than any other hardship, more than hunger and sickness and violence, the 22-month conflict in Sudan's Darfur region has been a crisis of people in flight. Since the early spring of 2003, more than 1.5 million people have been driven from their farmland by conflict, forced to abandon the millet and wheat and watermelon patches tilled by their forefathers and head into the unknown.
The forced exodus is part of a wider, government-backed effort to remove Africans from their land and give nomadic Arabs, who are allied with the Arab-dominated Khartoum government, more room to graze their cattle, according to the United Nations and human rights advocates. A drought has dried the Arabs' land, and they are pushing farther south, into traditional African territory.
As the Arab Janjaweed militias ravage the region, African rebel groups have fought back in an increasingly aggressive campaign to defend their lands and challenge Arab political dominance. Darfur's villagers are caught in the crossfire.
African farmers and Arab herders have engaged in sporadic violence for years, but no one can remember a time when so many people were driven from their homes. In less than two years, the new conflict has virtually eradicated African village life in Darfur, a rugged region the size of France, and there are growing fears that it may never be restored.
Until spring 2003, Darfur was a labyrinth of straw-roofed, igloo-shaped structures known as tukuls and markets where women hunched over stools preparing tiny cups of inky coffee and selling pyramids of tomatoes and onions. Now, the terrain has become a wasteland of decapitated huts, bomb craters, vacant markets and children's charred flip-flops abandoned in the sand.
Many homeless families have taken up extended residence in dozens of camps scattered across Darfur, but others have been forced to move repeatedly.
Halima's family reached the acacia tree after a year-long odyssey of repeated escapes from mayhem. They arrived Oct. 11, fleeing with a dozen others from a refugee camp after an attack there by Janjaweed fighters left nine people dead and the health clinic looted.
Now, on a hot stretch of scrubby field, the refugees are trying to reknit the shattered rhythms of their daily life: a farmer grieving over his brother's murder, a little girl missing the taste of cow's milk, and a century-old blind man longing for the land his family had tilled for 17 generations.
Sept. 9, 2003
Ta'asha to Bashom
Mohamed Adam Mohamed and his family had just finished taking their customary 10:30 a.m. breakfast of sweet tea and millet porridge with okra sauce, a dish known as asida, when they heard shots. Mohamed looked out of his hut and saw men on horses and camels stampeding through their village, Ta'asha. There were huts on fire and voices shouting, "Slaves, get off the land!"
"We had heard this was happening in other places," recalled Mohamed, his round face somber beneath a gray turban. "We grabbed some blankets, water jugs and cooking pots and ran into the bush."
By 6 p.m., 22 villages in the area were aflame. The family hid behind thorns and high grass, hunkered in the hot sand.
"We had to be silent," Mohamed recalled. "I just kept praying for the children not to cry. The most important thing was to save my family. The rest we could grow again."
When the marauders withdrew, the men ventured back. Halima, Mohamed's young cousin, tugged on his long white robe. She wanted to go, too. Her father was missing, and her mother was crying hysterically.
Mohamed gently held her back, and later he was grateful for his decision. The sight awaiting him was worse than he had imagined.
All five family huts were burned, and 30 men were dead. Among them, Mohamed found the bodies of his brother and his uncle Hamis -- Halima's father.
Hamis was 40 and the father of seven. His body was slumped under the ruins of his burned mud and straw hut. He had two bullet wounds, one in the chest and one in the head. In an abandoned hut nearby, five girls huddled motionless, smeared with dirt and blood. They had been raped by the attackers, Mohamed said.
"I was feeling so angry," he said. "I was praying to God for the first time in my life that I too could have a weapon. But I had nothing."
That day, in the smoldering village, Mohamed buried two men with whom he had grown up, shared wedding ceremonies and farmed in the thorn fields nearly every day of his adult life. There was no time to wrap the bodies in white sheets and bury them in wood coffins, as Islamic tradition requires.
Instead, the survivors gathered around two dirt mounds and recited the Islamic prayer for the dead: "God bless them. Take their souls to paradise. Keep them among good people."
With her little brother strapped to her back, Halima left Ta'asha and walked for three hours in the darkness until the family reached Bashom, a market village near the regional capital, Nyala.
Sept. 29, 2003
Bashom to Ta'asha
For the next 20 days, they camped under a cluster of trees. The village elder in Bashom, a blind man named Abakar Yusuf who estimated his age at 119, instructed the villagers to collect grains and donate them to the newcomers.
"We are all from the same tribe, the Dago, and many of us are even relatives," Yusuf said in a raspy voice. He held court from his sagging bed, his frail and useless legs poking out like toothpicks from beneath his robe. Not much shocked him anymore, he said, but he never could have imagined what was taking place in Darfur.
cont'd at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13248-2004Nov25.html?nav=lb&sub=AR
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
