The Continuing Genocide

I spent over two months in Darfur, assessing the health of the displaced and conflict-affected, and implementing health programs to forestall a health disaster, but a health disaster was imminent anyway.

While White House lawyers pored over material to determine if Darfur met the international legal criteria to be called a genocide, the genocide continued. The war was one of semantics for Washington power brokers. The genocide in Srebrenica had occurred almost ten years earlier, yet it was only in 2003 that the World Court in Geneva ruled that in fact a genocide had taken place. Too little, too late for the dead of Srebrenica. I feared the same for the people of Darfur.

The horrific stories from Darfur continued to trickle out. The tormented stories of Halima, Hawa, and Ibrahim were terrible even if they stood alone, but their stories portrayed only three of the more than one million terror-filled experiences of that place and that time. Their anguished stories barely scratched the surface of the misery that was, and is, Darfur.

In June 2004, US satellite photos identified over three hundred decimated villages in Darfur, villages that were plundered and burned, nothing left but scorched, tired earth.¹ The rapes and murders and torment of the innocent of Darfur continued at an alarming pace despite assurances by the government that they would ensure that the vicious activities of the Janjaweed would cease.

The recurring theme of military helicopters circling villages only to be followed by vicious attacks by Janjaweed continued. Women who survived reported abductions and repeated rapes and torture. There were similar stories of rape camps, areas where women were held and raped and tormented again and again until their captors tired of them and either killed or released them. Men reported seeing others in their villages murdered or taken by force, their whereabouts still unknown, although they were likely dead as well. Children continued to suffer the most; their displacement was a literal death sentence, for it is they, the most vulnerable, who die first of starvation, disease, and neglect.

Inexplicably, the rebels in Darfur who’d been fighting the Janjaweed joined the fray and attacked aid convoys and harassed and detained aid workers. Sixteen UN workers were abducted and held for two days by the SLA in a village in North Darfur in June 2004.² The rebels were purposely disrupting the very aid process that the people they vowed to protect so desperately needed. Their brazen actions gave credibility to the government’s claims of rebel abuse and provocation and surely helped to prolong the Janjaweed’s reign of terror.

The government responded by accusing NGOs and the UN of supporting rebel activities and actually expelled a UN worker from Darfur. The UN angrily protested, but there was little else they could do. The government also targeted several NGOs as complicit with the rebels and took steps to limit their activities. The government was stepping up their bizarre rhetoric and strange accusations in response to increasing pressure from world leaders. They would continue to deny any involvement in the Darfur tragedy despite the obvious blood on their hands.

On the last day of June 2004, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, made an official visit to Sudan to protest the horrors of Darfur and to urge the government of Sudan to stop the carnage there. As part of his mission, he traveled to Darfur, to the camp at Abu-Shok, to see the refugees for himself.³ The usually stoic and subdued inhabitants of Abu-Shok, I was told, crawled out of their tiny plastic huts and cheered his arrival.

That image, that powerful and tender description of cheering, waving refugees gave me such hope, until I learned that the government had forced the healthiest among these war-ravaged people to appear, to cheer and wave and smile and prove to Colin Powell and the world that they were healthy and happy and well fed indeed. The sickliest were told to stay out of sight. To beef up the appearance of the IDPs, the government infiltrated the camp with its own workers, their trickery evidenced by the men’s shiny leather shoes and the women’s obesity. Colin Powell’s entourage was reported to have noticed the interlopers and knew that they were government plants. The government continued their heinous games.

Within days of Colin Powell’s visit, the head of the UN, Kofi Annan, made an official sojourn to Sudan to protest the government’s villainous actions in Darfur, and he, too, included a visit to that beleaguered region. His itinerary included a stop at Al Mashtel, the camp which, though it had seemingly been emptied and its inhabitants moved to Abu-Shok, then housed some four thousand desperate arrivals for whom there was no place else to go. They lived there in squalor, without food, without water, and without shelter. It would have made for a compelling meeting, but when Annan arrived, the camp’s inhabitants had disappeared; all that remained were some stray donkeys picking through the rubble. The government had purposely moved these squatters to avoid any embarrassment.

Annan’s delegation moved then to Abu-Shok and spoke with several inhabitants there. The government watched the proceedings with heightened interest, as only certain IDPs had been chosen to speak, the better to contain information. Names of others who spoke were written down, and several days later, three of those IDPs who had dared to step forward and be heard were arrested by the government for interacting with the delegation.⁴

Despite the government’s attempts to depict a rosy situation in Darfur, the reality was that the situation was deteriorating for the IDPs. Malnutrition was increasing, and, without fuel for food preparation, it would increase further despite food rations being delivered by WFP. Dysentery was rising and medicine that we had hoped would last for many months was running out. Malaria, too, was on the rise, and the disease burden on this already fragile population could prove deadly.

I was asked to return to Darfur, and, lipstick in hand, returned there in August 2004, just a few short months after my departure, to resume my role there.