A Secret War

Sudan, the largest nation in Africa, is a country that seems forever plagued by war. It boasts a tormented history of conflict, turmoil, and support for terrorism. It was to Sudan that Osama bin Laden fled in the late 1990s when the heat was on. He was sheltered there until world pressure and the American bombing of a government pharmaceutical factory forced the government of Sudan to reconsider the wisdom of hosting bin Laden. They finally ousted him in 1996. Sudan had also been the sight of a particularly vicious civil war for over twenty years, producing refugees like Grace and the others I’d met in Kakuma in 2001.

By 2004, the world had lost interest in the interminable scuffles and posturing in Sudan. Our distinct lack of interest allowed another far more heinous and corrupt conflict to develop in the distant western part of Sudan known as Darfur. The remote Darfur district of western Sudan, one of the world’s poorest and most inaccessible regions, was then home to approximately six million people, representing 20 percent of Sudan’s total population and comprising a complex mix of tribes.¹ A mixture of Arab and Christian, they had, for the most part, contained their ethnic and tribal rivalries over the years and had even managed to live side by side.

The people of Darfur had long been isolated in its unforgiving and harsh environs—bone dry and blisteringly hot for most of the year, until the flooding rains came and invariably washed away crops, animals, possessions, and hopes. Only the hearty and determined could survive there, and survive they did, even growing bountiful crops that helped to feed the region through the dry, dusty, and barren months. The year 2002, however, saw the start of a worrying drought, and the meager food resources, already in danger, had essentially disappeared by late 2003. The long war in the south had left the Darfurians far from the central government’s focus; that conflict was taking much of the government’s resources and attention and fostering a growing sense of animosity, in addition to a literal, as well as figurative, distance between the government and this remote region.

This was a region and a situation that were ripe for exploitation. In February 2003, two rebel groups—the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)—took matters into their own hands. Claiming to represent the oppressed people of Darfur, they launched attacks against Government of Sudan (GoS) garrisons in the region. The Sudan military retaliated with attacks on rebel positions and an aerial bombing campaign against villages suspected of sympathizing with or harboring rebels. The bombing raids reportedly included cargoes of scrap metal, rusted automobiles, discarded appliances, and more heaved out of military airplanes onto unsuspecting villages below, resulting in several deaths.

The government also activated an independent militia of Arab horsemen, known as the Janjaweed (literally, ‘evil men on horses’). Those militias were like a pack of feral wolves, but they were far more dangerous because they had been trained, armed, and supported by the Sudanese military. They adopted brutal tactics in their conquest of villages and were efficient in their cruelty, even coordinating their gruesome attacks on innocent villages by assigning groups for looting, for burning, for raping, and for killing. In addition to the pillaging of villages, the Janjaweed militias abducted boys, murdered men, stole livestock, poisoned water supplies, and raped girls and women. Their brazen strategy included branding the hands of the women and girls they raped, an evil maneuver intended to prolong the humiliation and torment of their victims. But they were perhaps best known for the fear they instilled in the hearts and minds of the citizens of Darfur, for even the whisper that the Janjaweed were nearby emptied homes and villages and created literal ghost towns of once bustling villages.

Darfur, a vulnerable, chronically underdeveloped region with precious few reserves in the best of times, was not prepared to cope with these worst of times. In late 2003, disease, starvation, and death loomed on the horizon. To keep news of the scope of this devastating situation from filtering out, the government actively restricted visas and travel permits to journalists and aid workers. The remoteness and relative inaccessibility of the Darfur region, along with the government’s control of regional travel, fostered the development of a silent humanitarian crisis that for many months went almost unnoticed, delaying the response from the outside world and limiting media coverage of the plight of Darfurians. The result had been scant news of the crisis; what little trickled through came mostly from the Chad border, where just over one hundred thousand Darfurians had fled. Still, the greater number, over one million, were displaced within Darfur, far from the world’s eyes and attention.

The usually staid UN, finally angered by the constant obstacles placed in the path of those trying to help, went so far as to call the horrific hidden conflict “ethnic cleansing.” The chief UN humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, described the situation in Darfur as “the worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan . . . and one of the worst in the world at the moment.”²

The government’s complicity in the carnage in Darfur was well known, but without the obligatory hard evidence of atrocities, it seemed that there was no government, no world leader with the courage to stand up for these tortured people and put a stop to the genocide. Ten years after the horrific genocide in Rwanda and the pledges of world leaders that “never again” would the world stand silently by, stand silently by they did. Their pledges rang hollow and empty in the deserts of Darfur, where those fleeing the carnage made no sounds, no cries of anguish, no labored breathing as they ran for their lives. The touch of their bare feet on the sandy earth elicited no sound, no warning to the marauders who were mercilessly hunting them down. A silent escape was their only hope, for they were being hunted, killed, raped, maimed, and tortured by the thousands, their panicked flight invisible to the world, but not to the aid groups who’d been quietly waiting and watching and planning their moves.

In February 2004, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) asked if I would be part of an emergency team they were sending to Darfur in order to assess the situation and provide assistance to the displaced and war-affected people there. This would be another first in assignment, more meetings, more waiting, but I was ready, and it was into this political and humanitarian quagmire that I headed in early March 2004.