LATE IN THE EVENING of the spring equinox, I was sitting in a small room with a rough table, a plastic chair, and a cot with a sagging, smelly mattress on the compound of a medical NGO in a town in eastern Chad. I was going over my notes from interviews earlier in the day, when John Denver came through the door. Ok, so it was not really John, who, having been dead, lo those many years, might have difficulty ambling into my room, but rather it was John Denver’s voice that came wafting into the room and began wrestling with the poomp poomp poomp of the music playing in the guards’ shack on the other side of the whitewashed wall from my bed.
I looked out the screen door to see how it was exactly that John Denver had come to Guereda, Chad singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” one of the few songs of his that I can still tolerate. I saw the Italian midwife sitting outside under the boukarou with her laptop. She had unplugged her earphones to share the music with the Azerbaijani surgeon. Both women smiled and looked a little dreamy as John sang “…so kiss me and smile for me, tell me that you’ll wait for me, hold me like you’ll never let me go.”
Far out.
All things being equal on the equinox, I would probably have chosen something African, or some modern jazz over some smarmy John Denver tune, but the song the guards were listening to was so distorted, I couldn’t tell what language it was in. So, go get ‘em, John.
I was in Chad because Khartoum had declined to issue me a visa to enter Darfur. Lots of Darfurian rebels hung out in eastern Chad, and there had been a number of cross-border attacks by Sudanese Janjaweit into Chad, so that’s where I went.
I specifically went to Guereda to report on rising ethnic tensions between the Tama and Zaghawa tribes. I had finished my work, but was staying for an extra day because of the visit of the President of Chad, S.E. Idriss Deby Itno. In the midst of the ethnic violence Deby came to try to calm tensions between the tribes. Deby is a Zaghawa. Guereda is the seat of Dar Tama, the land of the Tama people. As a part of the campaign to quell the violence, Deby made changes to the civil administration, changing out the Minister of Defense, the Governor and the Prefect of Guereda, in all three cases replacing an ethnic Zaghawa or Gorane with an ethnic Tama. The new Minister of Defense was a Tama, Mahamat Nour, who, less than twelve months before, had led an unsuccessful armed coup d’état against Deby.
Apparently, all was forgiven.
Or maybe not, forgiveness is complex there.
That morning, just after sunrise, the Sultan’s drummers began practicing on his compound—it’s hard to call it a palace—next door to the medical compound where I was staying. They did that most of the morning, took a break at noon, then began again after the 2:30 prayers and continued through the afternoon and late into the evening. They were still at it, more or less, when the poomp poomp poomp was playing, and John Denver floated in. Their singer, who was not exactly John Denver, ran through his repertoire of epic song-poems, both of them, for about four hours, his voice blaring through the bullhorn attached to the minaret of the Mosque on the Sultan’s compound. Sadly, I did not speak whatever language he was singing in, so I missed a lot, but if I were guessing I would have said he was singing the epic story of the Tama people. Or maybe he was simply singing the tried and true theme of all songwriters: I am loving you and you are loving me; we are loving each other and I can’t live without you.
Again, all things being equal, I might have chosen John Denver over the unintelligible poomp, poomp, poomp, but there was a certain charm to the epic song poems that won me over, particularly given that the next song the Italian midwife played was “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” Regardless, I had no choice in the matter, all of these musical selections were provided for me simultaneously.
Son Excellence, Monsieur Le President was coming because the fighting between the Tama and the Zaghawa had slipped into something entirely different. In my notes back at the office I had called it, “something sinister, something that looks a lot like ethnic cleansing.”
This is how it started. Young, armed Tama men were stopping people in the street in Guereda and asking them their identity, their ethnicity. Those who were not Tama were beaten and warned to get out of town, out of Dar Tama. Sometimes the victims were afraid to stay in Guereda to even get treatment at one of the two NGO-run hospitals there, so they traveled forty kilometers away to a hospital in Dar Zaghawa. Some died on the way. The week before, armed Tama men had gone into the refugee camp in Kounoungo and beaten Zaghawa and Gorane women, to the delighted applause of the Tama women watching.
This is how it spread. Zaghawa extremists stopped a commercial transporter on the road from Guereda to Am Zoer, separated the passengers by ethnicity, and then executed the Tama. We counted seventy Tama men murdered in small villages in three months. Many showed signs of torture or mutilation.
All things being equal, I figured things were getting worse.
The root causes of the conflict are multiple and complex, but there was a common theme: both tribes sought revenge. The Tama sought revenge for generations of abuse at the hands of the Zaghawa and Gorane. The young Tama felt that Nour’s appointment as Minister of Defense had immunized them against prosecution for attacks on Zaghawa and Gorane. The Zaghawa, whose Dar spread well across into Darfur, and among whom perhaps seventy-five thousand or perhaps one hundred thousand had died in that war, felt they were victims of a genocide and knew that the Tama took part in some of those attacks while acting as mercenaries, as Janjaweit, for the Government of Sudan in exchange for arms and training for their failed coup d’etat. The Zaghawa militias, in an inspired and ironic bit of literalism, referred to themselves as Zaghawa Janjaweit.
Often, in this part of the world, when there is a killing, the victim’s family is awarded a payment—blood money—called diyah. Once the family accepts the diyah, the case is settled and there can be no reprisals. But sometimes the relationship between the tribes is such that the diyah is not allowed. In some cases, members of one tribe consider themselves superior to another. The Arabs there and in Darfur feel that they have a master-slave relationship with the non-Arabs. Generally, one cannot accept diyah from a slave. In these cases there is only the ridah—ridah means calming. The ridah calms the immediate situation but doesn’t end the dispute. The victims’ families reserve the right to seek further compensation, further restitution, revenge. Maybe they seek it; maybe they don’t. Forgiveness is complex.
There’s another little piece of irony to all this: Arabs in Darfur and Eastern Chad call the Zaghawa and other non-Arab tribes zurg, meaning black and abid, meaning slave. And, although generally one cannot accept diyah from a slave, Arabs in Darfur will accept diyah from Zaghawa. Zaghawa in Chad consider themselves superior to the Tama and refuse to accept diyah from them, only ridah. This is how killings become blood feuds that last for generations.
All things being equal, it seemed nothing was equal.
And I kind of got it, I mean I understood what was going on, but I nonetheless had grown up in a world where tribe and clan and vengeance were just words and not ways of life, so there really was no way I would ever completely get it. And so, of course, the killing and dying went on, and it spiraled into something like ethnic cleansing and then John Denver wafted into my room singing “Leaving On a Jet Plane,” and the guards outside were listening poomp poomp poomp to some song that may or may not have been in French, and the Homer of Guereda was singing The Iliad and The Odyssey of the Tama people only there was no Wine Dark Sea in that one, just, I presumed, lots of killing and dying.
Into this entered the president. He arrived, and made some speeches and appointed new authorities to assuage one side, then worked to find some way to assuage the other side. And maybe it would work like a diyah or maybe it would only calm things, like a ridah.
And, oh by the way, eastern Chad was a sideshow compared to the real killing, the hundreds of thousands of dead in Darfur. But you have to give these things time.