I HAD ARRIVED FROM WASHINGTON via London and Addis Ababa, but ran into some trouble getting a visa. Just before I was to deploy, Secretary of State Colin Powell had called what was happening in Darfur by its rightful name: genocide. The government in Khartoum shut off communications with the U.S. military and put a hold on visas for military officials coming to Sudan. Someone in the office at the Defense Intelligence Agency—the agency that oversees the work of defense attachés—thought I might have less trouble getting a visa in London, so I spent two weeks there waiting.
I got a nice room in the same hotel Eisenhower’s staff had used in the months leading up to the D-Day Invasion. Every day I would call over to the American embassy to check in—they wanted nothing to do with me—and then I would call over to the Sudanese embassy to inquire about my visa. “No, not today,” was always the response. For the rest of the day, my time was my own. I visited lots of museums and took long walks around the city. One night in the Red Bar of the hotel, I had a conversation with a group of American tourists from Texas. They were big George Bush supporters who still believed that the chemical weapons ruse that Bush and Cheney had used to get the U.S. into the Iraq War there was the truth. Several stormed out when I tried to disabuse them of that lie.
After two weeks in London, headquarters decided to send me to Addis Ababa. It wasn’t any cheaper, but it was likely more defensible to my office director at DIA to have an officer cooling his heels in Addis than in London. So off I went.
I signed into the Defense Attaché office and began trying to be helpful. In some countries an extra set of trained hands around the office is a boon; in others, sometimes the best thing one can do is simply stay out of the way. Addis was in the latter category. I did my best to be helpful, and otherwise kept a low profile. After three weeks of this, the attaché walked in from a meeting and tossed my passport with a valid Sudanese visa on the table. The next day I was on a plane for Khartoum.
It’s the heat, really. It hits like a wave. That’s the first thing you noticed. No worse, I suppose, than Phoenix in the summer, but it was bloody hot. I arrived in October, just at the end of the rains. I landed at forty minutes past two in the morning. The temperature was 94 degrees in the city, considerably hotter on the airfield.
Khartoum sits at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. The White Nile flows northwards from Lake Victoria in Uganda, through the Sudd, a leviathan of a swamp, rambling from the forests into the savannas and finally into the desert. The Blue Nile falls from the Ethiopian highlands, bringing with it the rich volcanic soils that for centuries have made Egyptian civilization possible. It was a trick of the geographers to give the rivers colorful names. For they are neither blue nor white, they are tan and grey. But they are lush, sumptuous gods in a place of want; they flow ever northward, carrying with them the true stuff of life. And where they meet is Khartoum and Omdurman.
Omdurman sits on the west side of the Nile, just past the confluence. Khartoum sits on the point of land between the White Nile flowing directly north, and the Blue Nile, which turns westward to join it. The oldest part of Khartoum faces north, watching the rivers flow past, looking toward Egypt a thousand miles away.
The old colonial buildings still stand facing the Blue Nile. Cannons left from the days of Gordon and Kitchener line the drive in front of the presidential palace. On the north side of the Blue Nile, upriver from the palace, a rusting hulk, half-sunk in the mud, is said to be one of Kitchener’s steamers. Two hours north, at the sixth cataract, another rusty scrap is believed to be one of Gordon’s gunboats. Who knows?
The new city is built around the airfield, which sits smack in the center of the two main north-south roads. I lived on the east side of the airfield in a neighborhood called Riyadh, hemmed in by the Blue Nile and the dozens of Soviet-made, UN-chartered Ilyushins and Antonovs that formed the backbone of the relief effort for Darfur. The din of their take-offs and landings was near constant, and in addition to simply providing background noise, it served as a reminder of why I had come, more or less.
I arrived during Ramadan, so at first I didn’t get much of an idea what the city was truly like. The Eid al Fitr would come in ten days or so, and then I’d see the city come alive. But it was a fine time to learn the streets, with people staying in as much as possible during the fast. No restaurants were open during the day. They would start to come to life at sunset as people gathered for iftar, the breaking of the fast, and would remain open long into the night. When I first arrived, I ate at a roadside kebab stand and had a wonderful sizzling plate of beef with tomatoes and onions. In the embassy, we had a Lebanese restauranteur and several Sudanese cooks who made lunch for us at just slightly less than exorbitant rates. The hummus was good, but it could have used a touch more garlic.
On the streets, small three wheeled “Tuk-Tuks” served as taxis. I suspect their name is onomatopoeic for the clatter they made with their two-stroke engines. They are ubiquitous. New arrivals, myself included, invariably commented on how charming or cute or interesting they are. After one day of driving however, they became the bane of your existence and it was everyone’s departure fantasy to crush one under the wheels of an SUV on the way to the airport. We didn’t actually let people drive to the airport on their way out for just that reason.
Walking in the street was also a popular sport, rather like that 1980’s video game “Frogger.” Pedestrians would try to make it across five lanes of space in which cars jockeyed for position without regard for lane markers, at speeds rivaling NASCAR tracks. It was amusing at first, but like the Tuk-Tuks, it grated on one’s nerves after a while and, as we learned as children—or at least as undergraduates—invariably, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. And someone always got hurt.
I lived for a while in a three-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a three-story house. There was a small green space in the front into which I installed plastic lawn furniture and where I enjoyed breakfast or an evening libation—any time in between it was too hot to be outside. At eight o’clock every evening, the Imams began their verbal dueling from the minarets of the mosques in the neighborhood. During the plainsong portion, it sounded like polyphonic and polyrhythmic Gregorian chant. I regularly sat outside in the evenings for a post-prandial cigar to enjoy the music.
The courtyard performed its ancient function well: it secluded me from the world outside. Since I had no television or Internet connection, I would sit with my radio and try to pick up day-old Deutsche Welle news or Arabic channels. BBC did a broadcast, too, but only an hour a day or so in English, and I could never seem to connect with it. So I was somewhat news-starved. But what little news I did get was not good.
The cease-fire in Darfur wasn’t holding. We were planning our first trip there. The situation seemed to be worsening despite the increasing number of peacekeepers—which remained ridiculously small. Perhaps, we speculated, it needed to get worse before it could get better. I learned this from Milosevic: if an insurgency and the government’s response can be kept at a low simmer, the international community won’t respond. A response requires an inciting incident, something like what happened at Racak in Kosovo.
In Darfur, there were hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced and barely hanging on. Villagers displaced by the Janjaweit militias were now being forced by government troops to return to their homes—even though these had been destroyed. Janjaweit were wearing Government of Sudan police uniforms. A new rebel group had popped up, equipped and backed by neighboring Chad. And that wasn’t the only war in the country.
In the south, where the war had been going on for a generation, both sides in the conflict were continuing to jockey for position in the waning days before the peace treaty was due to be signed. Both sides complained the other was profiting from maneuvering during the cease-fire. It wasn’t really much of a cease-fire, and the fighting went on in Africa’s longest civil war.
Sudan is one-third the size of the United States. Darfur alone is larger than Iraq; South Sudan is larger than France. The conflicts we were trying to stop were just as enormous, and there was little agreement on how to solve them. Religion was an issue, but not the issue. The Muslim leaders from the north paid Christians and other Muslims in the south to fight Christians who wanted equal or at least better treatment and more services from the government. Muslims killed Muslims in Darfur over ownership and control of scarce resources like water and food for cattle. Smack in the middle of the country were the oil fields that both the north and south claimed, and which funded the wars.
When, three generations earlier, two tribes would have fought with spears and moved on horses or camels, they were now racing around in Toyotas and carrying Kalashnikovs and machine guns. So it was a faster, more violent, and far bloodier fight.
The world intruded in both positive and negative ways. While diplomats worked to negotiate peace, soldiers from other African countries came as peacekeepers, and the humanitarian aid workers moved tens of thousands of tons of food weekly and built camps for the displaced; the fighting bands, like gangs, took on noms de guerre—one group called themselves Tora Bora.
In Khartoum, this escalation of foreign aid could be seen in the proliferation of Antonovs and Ilyushins at the airfield and of Toyota Land Cruisers on the streets. The usual suspects: soldiers, diplomats, aid workers made their homes there, clogging the stores and streets. The bar at the British embassy was packed on Friday nights. The members of the British diplomatic corps, as always, were smartly attired; everyone else, it seemed, had shopped at the same REI outlet, with some adding a bit of local color for dash.
I was a newcomer. The wars had been going on forever, it seemed. The ghosts of Gordon and Kitchener haunted the city. The Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement and Army were a generation into their negotiations with the government. Millions, yes, millions were dead because of the war in the south, and we were watching another war spin up in the west. Only a couple hundred thousand or so were dead so far in Darfur. And I was joining a team tasked to keep that number from growing.