The Truth of Darfur

The UN, on the other hand, had no time for secrets or sitting around, and as if they’d just remembered that they survived on meetings, by late September, the endless summits were on again. I spent much of my time flying back and forth between Darfur and Khartoum on the rickety planes of a small local airline. The Russian and Eastern European pilots sat in the cockpit in full view of the passengers and smoked incessantly, dropping their cigarette stubs into old twoliter plastic soda bottles filled with murky water. They were always the first ones off the plane, cigarettes still dangling from their lips, fatigue streaking their eyes. They never looked back at us, never acknowledged us. It was as though we weren’t even there.

In Khartoum, the meetings took on a sense of urgency not unlike the earliest days of our intervention here. By October, conditions throughout Darfur were as miserable as ever despite the government’s attempts to depict an improving situation. New arrivals to Kalma reported that government tanks were razing their villages even as the government continued to deny any involvement in or knowledge of the atrocities. The government, perhaps weary of all the attention paid to Darfur, announced plans to forcibly send thousands of refugees from Kalma back to their destroyed villages. The logic of that mandate was beyond reason, and the refugees refused to go. Through their elders, they announced that the government would have to shoot them, for they would not leave Kalma. This was a government though that would indeed shoot its own people. The prospect of a standoff cast a pall over our meetings and heightened the misery of Darfur. Few of us had ever witnessed a more volatile situation, and we held our breath as the tensions increased.

In October, while I was in Khartoum, two policemen were murdered in Kalma during a food distribution. The food rations allotted for each person had been reduced yet again, and the NGO responsible for distributing those rations was late at getting the food out. People were on edge, fearful that they would not get food and that they would be forced out of the camp without warning. In that frenzy of fear, anything could happen. And it did—two policemen were killed. The facts of the killings were never clear. We were not allowed into the camp for several days, until the furor had died down. By then, the truth of the incident was lost somewhere in the thick, hot, dusty air.

October also saw a troubling rise in incidents aimed at the international community working in Darfur. An expat with World Vision was arrested in Nyala. He was held overnight, but the charges were never established and he was released. Two Irish aid workers with Save the Children UK were killed in North Darfur when their vehicle rolled over a land mine. That incident had its intended effect; aid workers were not allowed into that region until safety could be assured. The roads to our remotest camps were plagued by robberies and banditry. The insecurity made the work of helping that much more difficult.

The Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA, the rebels fighting the Janjaweed) approached the UN and asked for food. They said that they were literally starving and would be forced to rob aid workers if they were not fed soon. It was a dilemma, since the UN mandate says you cannot feed combatants, but these people were starving. Unlike the Janjaweed, the SLA had no government backing or contributors. There seemed endless problems, all without solution. The SLA rebels were never provided with food aid. The attacks on aid workers continued.

Meanwhile, Khartoum was the site of a serious coup attempt. Though there were countless opponents to the government, they had yet to raise a successful strategy, and many of the instigators of this failed attempt were arrested. Perhaps to reassert itself after the failed coup attempt, the government destroyed a shantytown just outside Khartoum. The area was poor and was inhabited by many of Darfur’s and South Sudan’s displaced. They had built small houses and lived there in relative comfort and safety, but in Khartoum, comfort and safety could not be relied on. A friend of mine from IRC’s Khartoum office lived there, and I went out with her to see the remnants of her neighborhood. There was little left to see.

Once sturdy homes had been razed by bulldozers and had been reduced to dust and rubble. Many of the residents rebuilt makeshift shelters, but they essentially lived in the open and were forced to tramp over unsteady piles of rubble to get about. Many people did not have the resources to build even a makeshift shelter and simply lived among the rubble. The conditions were miserable. Kalma seemed comfortable in comparison.

None of us could speak up. We had been told that the government would likely expel any of us who did. I asked Eunice, my friend from South Sudan who was living amidst the rubble, how she managed not to be angry.

Her eyes filled up with tears. “We are just helpless here,” she said. “We are without hope.”

Tears pricked my eyes but I held them back. “Don’t lose hope,” I said softly. It was the only reply I could muster, but the truth was, I had lost hope, too.