Hawa and the Terrors of the Janjaweed

The stories of the Janjaweed’s barbarous acts were swiftly becoming the stuff of legend. They were the cruelest militia imaginable. There was no basis for this war of atrocities beyond the original rebellious and pathetically ineffective rebel attacks on government garrisons in 2003. The government’s retaliatory attacks on civilians in the area were clear violations of international law and basic decent behavior. This seemed to be a government of thugs. The proof of that lay in the stories of their victims.

Hawa was thirty-two years old when I met her in the health tent in Al Mashtel. She wore a faded pink dress and head scarf, a perfect complement to her shiny, nut-brown skin. Through an interpreter, I learned that she’d only recently escaped an attack on her village in Tawila, about a three-hour drive from Al Fasher. She’d been a busy midwife in Tawila, delivering babies, caring for women, often with only a bag of feed or grain as payment for her services.

“My life was good,” she said, a sudden light swimming in the deep black of her eyes. “My husband farmed a small piece of land, where he grew cucumbers and tomatoes, sometimes onions or even beans if the last year’s harvest had been good. My three girls were growing strong, and all attended school in the village center.” She smiled, a sad, lopsided lift to her mouth, as though she was struggling with the memories. “Life was better than it would ever be again. I just didn’t know how lucky I was.”

They’d lived, she said, in a small mud plaster house surrounded by their treasures. Her greatest treasure, aside from her children, had been her UNFPA midwife bag, which she’d received at her graduation from the Ministry of Health (MoH) midwifery school in Al Fasher many years before. It had contained everything she’d needed to care for the women and babies of her village. She and her husband had been respected members of the community of Tawila. They’d heard of the Janjaweed attacks in other nearby villages and had even spoken to victims as they’d stopped in Tawila en route to safety in Al Fasher. But, as is common for all of us, they’d never expected that they would be attacked, that their lives would be turned upside down and that they would have to struggle simply to survive. “That was the kind of thing that happened to other people,” she said firmly. “Not to us. Not in Tawila.”

She was quiet then, sitting perfectly straight in one of the clinic’s wooden chairs, her long, graceful fingers playing with the edges of her dress. I waited, afraid to interfere, wanting her to have the time to tell me what she’d come to say. After a time, she cleared her throat and began.

“The day was warm,” she remembered. “I had delivered a baby in the very early morning and I’d planned to return to check on the baby and mother later that day. My girls had just gone to school, my husband was in the fields.” She paused again, seeming to roll the memories over in her mind.

I touched her arm. “Are you okay?” I asked. “You don’t have to finish.”

Her eyes were moist. She smiled wanly and continued.

“I’d been paid for the morning’s delivery, so I planned to go to the market to buy some eggs for dinner. I counted out my coins, placed them in my small purse, and started out.”

Just then, three small girls, all dressed in the traditional gauzy veil and brightly colored dresses, shuffled in, their eyes searching until they rested on Hawa. “My girls,” she said and smiled warmly as she greeted each with a hug and whispered endearments. The three avoided my gaze and shyly looked down, pushing the sandy earth about with their sandaled feet. She motioned them to sit on a nearby bench and she continued.

“I walked to the market in the center of the village,” she said. “It seemed somehow different that day, a kind of tension in my quiet village. A crowd had gathered,” she remembered. “But they were quiet, almost solemn; I thought someone important had died.”

She’d watched, puzzled, as people had whispered to one another while still others had seemed to be leaving the marketplace, their donkeys straining under the weight of bags of grain and household items. People had been in a hurry in a place where there was nothing to hurry for. “Something was very wrong; I could feel it, and I was suddenly afraid.” She’d seen a friend standing in the midst of the crowd and approached her.

“What is it? What is wrong?” she’d asked her friend Zeinab.

Zeinab’s eyes had grown wide with terror. “The Janjaweed,” she’d whispered. “They are near.”

“Those words could only mean one thing,” Hawa declared. “Tawila was about to be attacked. I have never known such fear or confusion.”

I could see the pain of that moment in her red-rimmed eyes and in the fine tremors of her hands as she relived those hours. She spoke softly, quietly, so her girls might not hear. “Everyone was consumed with fright that day, afraid to move, afraid not to.”

Some men had planned to fight, she said, and they’d raced for their weapons; others had known that the only sure way to survive was to escape the village or to run and hide in the wadi, the drying riverbed. Hawa had hesitated, unsure if she should escape to the fields or gather her children from the school. The Janjaweed had answered her hesitation by galloping toward the village center; the unmistakable sounds of the horses’ hooves and the cries of the villagers had filled the air and destroyed all hope of getting to the school. She’d joined others in the desperate race to the wadi, and as she and countless others had crouched there silently, they’d listened helplessly to the agonizing screams of terror coming from the village. They’d watched in horror as clouds of black smoke had drifted into the clear blue sky. She’d hunkered there for what seemed an eternity until all sounds of distress had faded. She didn’t know how long she’d been there, but on that day in late February, the sun had been high in its full heat of the day as she and many others had emerged tentatively from their hiding places.

She’d been filled with dread as she’d run to the schoolhouse, stumbling and falling several times, tearing her veil as she’d hurriedly picked herself up. Her hands were balled into tight fists as she continued her story.

“I passed bloodied bodies in the road, many that I knew and had called friend, but I couldn’t stop to help. I had to find my children.” She’d reached the school just as many others had. The sobbing and terrified teachers and students had poured out of the small building, some wounded and covered in blood, others’ clothes torn. All had appeared somehow disheveled and unlike the laughing girls they’d been just hours earlier. Something terrible had happened here. “I rushed ahead, pushing people out of my way. I had to find my girls,” she said, her voice cracking.

She was lucky; she’d found her girls, gathered them up quickly, and told them they had to leave Tawila. They’d raced to her husband’s fields, but the fields had been smoldering and smoking, and there had been no sign of him; no sign that he’d even been there. His scorched crops had been abandoned. He seemed to have just disappeared.

“We could not wait,” she sobbed. “We couldn’t even go back to the house to get anything. I was too afraid the Janjaweed would be there, and so we fled. For three days and nights, we walked; we hid in the wadi, we hardly slept, so desperate was I to reach Al Fasher.”

She’d had no word of her husband, but she knew it was likely that the Janjaweed had killed him, for it is the men they target for death, the men who might one day rise up and fight back and defeat these vicious thugs.

Many others had disappeared that day as well. Hawa had had no word of Zeinab, her lifelong friend, no way to know if she’d been murdered or kidnapped, or somehow escaped. She had no idea either of what had happened to the tiny baby she’d helped to deliver that morning; surely he and his mother, still weak from the delivery, would have been trapped in their tiny house during the attack. Hawa did not want to think of what might have befallen them.

When I asked her, Hawa said she would not return to Tawila. “It is not safe there,” she whispered out of earshot of her children. “I cannot return until I know that we will be safe, and that may never happen. Our journey here to Al Mashtel was long, and we were tired and hungry and thirsty and filled with fear for all of the three days we traveled. We feel safe here for now.”

Seventy-five people died that day in Tawila, among them several local merchants who were known to be vocal in their opposition to the government. It was presumed that those men had been singled out for death and purposely hunted down that February morning. Eyewitnesses reported that the Janjaweed were aided in this cruel and well-organized attack by uniformed members of the Sudanese military. There has been no government investigation of military involvement, just the usual, well-rehearsed denials.

Over ninety-three women, including forty-one schoolgirls and their teachers, were raped and tormented; one hundred and fifty women were reported abducted; an unknown number of men and boys were also kidnapped. Their fates are still not known.

Tawila became a ghost town on that bloody day filled with death and horror.¹