Tawila

On a hot, hazy morning, a month after the assault there, we finally had permission and permits to assess Tawila, the village from which Hawa and her children had fled. What had been a three-day escape on foot was a three-hour drive over rough, sandy roads. The drive was remarkable for the dust that covered all of us and for the empty villages we saw en route. Once-bustling settlements were now abandoned, all signs of life destroyed, the earth scorched. In the quiet of morning, you could almost hear the echoes of recent screams still lingering in the haze and dust.

Fields were abandoned, no harvesting or planting in this, the planting season. Without a fresh harvest to feed Darfur in the coming months, the future would be even bleaker than the present. This was a dead and empty land, courtesy of the Janjaweed’s reign of terror. The landscape just beyond Tawila on the road to Kebkabiya was even more desolate, village after village razed to the ground. The only signs that life of any kind had existed there were the scattered shards of clay pottery, only because the fires had managed to just singe the rugged clay. Entire communities had been decimated, almost as if an eraser had simply wiped everything clean, leaving barely a trace of the villagers and their lives.

Tawila, too, had changed from Hawa’s initial description of the carnage, which had been confirmed by so many others. It was eerily quiet on our visit, not the bustling, crowded village of people’s memories. There was still evidence of the Janjaweed’s brutality in the burned-out homes, smashed property still lying about, and scorched fields. I wondered which had been Hawa’s fields. Many houses remained; they’d likely been looted of everything of value, but still they stood, erect sentinels in their own defiance of the Janjaweed. Where there were homes, there was surely hope.

These rural villages consisted of simple mud plaster huts and homes; sometimes in the larger, more prosperous villages stood a few wooden structures—schools, a clinic, a municipal center. Electricity was rare, although some villages had acquired it; wells and boreholes had been dug to provide water. It was those water supplies that the Janjaweed had targeted and destroyed or poisoned, leaving the fragile population without the necessities of basic survival. Water now could only be drawn from drying, contaminated streams, placing the population at great risk of contracting one or another deadly disease.

Although most residents of Tawila had abandoned this place, there were budding signs of life once again, as perhaps one thousand IDPs whose villages had been attacked had stopped in Tawila on their way to somewhere, anywhere else. These IDPs were unsure if they would wait here in Tawila or just push on to Al Fasher. Here in Tawila, aid groups were starting assessments, trying to determine if aid was needed here, or if these displaced would simply move on. WFP arrived the day we were there as well. They were planning food distributions for the people staying here, good news for these starving families.

The British branch of the NGO Save the Children (SC-UK) opened a clinic in Tawila the day we arrived to assess the situation. The clinic was held in an old, dilapidated two-room schoolhouse in the village center. IDPs lingered nearby, many spending their days inside another old school building but hiding in the wadi at night, fearful of further attacks.

While at the SC-UK clinic in Tawila, I had an opportunity to speak to one of the staff there. Ibrahim had been a medical assistant and a resident of Tawila until the attacks there. He, his wife, and his two small children had escaped the massacre and fled to the safety of Al Fasher the day of the attack. Once he was sure his family was safe, he’d secured a job with SC-UK and returned to Tawila to help. Under the watchful eyes of the Sudan security forces, he told me what he knew about Tawila.

“You must be careful,” he whispered. “The Janjaweed are not far from here. They are camped out just beyond the village, and they are watching us. I fear that they will attack again. The SLA are nearby as well.” His eyes darted about as he spoke, landing first on the security men and then on his coworkers. It would be bad for him if he was found to be sharing this information with me. He was brave to speak so openly.

“Won’t the SLA provide some protection?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The SLA cannot protect us, but their very presence here convinces the Janjaweed to stay and harass us. We are pawns in the middle of their fight.”

No wonder the IDPs here planned on continuing their journey to safety. Ibrahim said that each day, countless IDPs headed to Al Fasher with loaded-up donkeys or goats in tow. Some were able to arrange rides on trucks going that way, but the outcome would be the same—Tawila would be abandoned and empty again if it were not protected.

“The Janjaweed are living openly in Kabkabiya,” he said. Kabkabiya was a town about four hours by car from Tawila. It was a large town housing an army garrison. If the Janjaweed were there, they had to have the permission of the army.

“The Janjaweed do nothing without the authorization of the military,” Ibrahim declared. “The military guides their attacks, sometimes sending in helicopters first to guide the offensive. Sometimes the Janjaweed even wear military uniforms, and they all carry military weapons.”

Ibrahim was not sure how long he would stay, for he was certain that Tawila would be attacked again and what had not been destroyed, ultimately would be. He wasn’t sure if the next attack would come from the Janjaweed or the rebels. For people living with paralyzing fear, either was an ominous proposition.

By July 2004, SC-UK considered closing or scaling down their clinics here. The Sudanese military had moved into Tawila and right into the clinic, ostensibly to protect the IDPs, but their very presence interfered with the clinic’s work by intimidating patients and staff, and placed the workers and IDPs at great risk should an attack occur.¹

But Ibrahim had not lost hope for the future of Tawila; he believed that the town would recover one day, and that his friends and family would return home to bring new life to this devastated region.

He just didn’t know when that would be.