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The woman shifted and played with the fabric draped over her legs. It was worn thin and colourless, but it still provided some dignity. She was struggling to explain what she’d been through, and the interpreter wasn’t helping.
Lena appreciated that it was getting late in the day, and curfew was soon. They were not allowed on the roads within an hour of sunset. You never knew when the Janjaweed were going to launch their next night-time raid. Well, some people seemed to know. The local government officials were extremely polite but shared little. Whenever they radioed to say that they could not, unfortunately, guarantee security on a certain road at a certain time, you knew you had to get back to base.
Lena squatted down to put herself at the same level as the woman. The interpreter, Wadood, was a bit too haughty, she noted in her head. It didn’t make sense to be standing tall when this woman was sharing such personal information. Next time she would try to get a female interpreter. You had to recognise that these interviews were extremely sensitive.
The woman, whose name was Aarya, drew a circle around her own bony knee, through the fabric. Again and again, this circle of the forefinger. She did not look at Lena’s face, just down at this circling. Perhaps it was soothing. Or something to occupy the mind instead of going into someplace more difficult.
Lena tried to bring Aarya back to the thread of her story. There were frequent breaks where the woman seemed to struggle. She would shake her head and twitch suddenly to the side, as if something had burned her. Lena wondered if she was feeling feverish, or was psychologically damaged by the trauma, or both.
The story so far was not unusual. The woman reported that she was from Farchana village and lived there with her husband and six children. When the Janjaweed came, they had no warning. There was the thumping of hooves in the distance, not even enough time to prepare any food or belongings. She swept up her youngest, who was still breastfeeding, in a cloth on her back and ran with two of her young children.
Her husband ran as well, but he must have gone in another direction because they lost contact. She had not seen or heard from him since. This was three months ago. She had no news of her older children, and worried that the eldest boy may have been captured.
‘You know what happens when they capture the boys,’ Wadood, the interpreter, said.
‘Is that what she said?’ Lena didn’t look up from the woman, although she aimed the question to him.
‘She doesn’t have to say it,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows.’
‘What is she actually saying?’ Lena said, annoyed. ‘I’d like to know how she’s choosing to express it.’
‘She’s not really saying anything,’ he said, and Lena had to admit he was right. The interview had descended into mumbles that Wadood didn’t bother to translate. The woman wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes while she circled her knee non-stop.
‘I think she’s traumatised,’ Lena said. ‘We should stop. Please tell her I’d like to thank her for telling us her story.’ She waited while he translated. She hoped he was choosing a kind and respectful phrasing. ‘And that I think she is really brave. And that her children are lucky to have her, as a parent. To protect them.’
When the interpreter said the last words, the woman smiled a weak smile and looked at Lena. It seemed like she wanted to ask a question herself, but lacked the courage to try.
‘Should we do one more interview?’ Lena asked.
‘Is that wise?’ Wadood said, looking at his watch. ‘Don’t you have what you need?’
‘Maybe that other lady, isn’t she Aarya’s sister?’
‘Oh, alright. One last one.’
‘Thanks Wadood. You’re the best.’ She didn’t mean a word of it, but had to keep things civil.
They found her sister Hiba, and she was willing to speak. She came from the same village and had also fled the Janjaweed attack. She was much more outspoken than her sister, and demanded some answers. She raised her voice and went on at length in her local language, looking straight at Lena, standing with her hands on her hips.
Hiba asked why they were left with no protection, the translator recounted. The Janjaweed, she said, they don’t come out of the air. Someone is paying their rations. She was shouting now. Someone is paying for their boots! Someone is feeding them and their horses! What is the UN going to do about it?
Lena tried to formulate a response, knowing nothing would satisfy this woman. She was not the UN, not a peacekeeper, she explained. She was not authorised to gather legal evidence for crimes, although she possibly could. She was just a communications officer from a medium-sized water-and-sanitation NGO. But she promised the woman that she would listen to whatever she wanted to say, and that she would make sure the facts were raised in Khartoum, Nairobi, Geneva and Brussels, where CWW had offices. She would take the story to the media, if that was what this woman wanted.
Hiba started again before Lena’s thin promises were finished. She raised her voice and punctuated her story with sound effects of muffled screams and yells. Lena tried not to grimace as she waited for the interpretation.
‘She says her sister was held down and attacked by four men,’ Wadood said. ‘The only reason Hiba wasn’t also set upon was because she kept shouting so loudly they didn’t want to do it, and kicked her in the stomach instead until she fainted. She says the Janjaweed aren’t ghosts. They are men, powerful men. And they are doing evil, on a large scale.’
‘Why are they doing it?’ Lena asked.
Wadood raised a pathetic smile, as if he wished he didn’t have to ask such a stupid question. But he duly translated. And then when Hiba answered, he turned back to Lena with a ‘told-you-so’ look.
‘Because they can,’ he said simply. ‘No one stops them.’
Hiba was clearly frustrated with Lena and waved away her questions. She would say no more. She spat in the dust and walked away.
––––––––
Her last night in Geneina, Lena went back on the rooftop with Jeanette. The air was clear, although a sandstorm was rumoured to be rolling across the land in the coming days. The flat landscape provided clear views on all sides for miles. The sunset had come and gone, leaving the sky a dull orange fading to dark grey.
Lena sipped from her water bottle, which had the reassuring taste of iodine to ensure that no bacteria would survive. She ran her hands over her shoulders to hold back a shiver as the heat disappeared from the day.
She heard them before she saw them, a rumble coming closer. Then, in the last vestiges of daylight, her eyes made out the outlines of men on horseback in the distance. There seemed to be hundreds of them, but their silhouettes overlapped and merged, moving so fast as a group it was impossible to tell. Their gallops beat out a scattered rhythm, not uniform. It was chaotic but steady all the same, providing just scant warning to the villages in their path.
With horror, Lena realised that they were heading straight towards the refugee camp she had been in earlier that day, with Wadood, Aarya, Hiba and all the others. The Janjaweed were beating their way across a flat and barren landscape to an unprotected settlement of war-worn women and children. There was no reason to be going there, just to cause terror. There would be no negotiations, and no mercy.
There was no time to warn them; Lena knew no radios or satellite phones were kept in the camp overnight. Jeanette ran down to the SOS room to try to get the word out through the UN in Geneina and Khartoum, to see if anything could be done.
Lena was powerless to help. From the rooftop, she saw torches light up when the horsemen reached the edges of the camp protected only by a thorny wood border fence. The refugees could not get out, nor hide. Horses reared up to kick down the barrier, and then many galloped inside. Even with the distance, Lena could sense the fear. Fire leapt up around the fencing and flashed from inside the camp. The flimsy tents and makeshift shelters would be no resistance against determined malice.
In what proved to be a few minutes, but felt achingly long, the Janjaweed on horseback started jumping back over the fencing and leaving the burning camp behind. Mission accomplished. Punishment inflicted, the motivation for it to be dissected by peacekeepers and journalists later. They would study the ashes and scratch their heads. What was the possible reason behind the violence? Why this refugee camp, and not others? What purpose could indiscriminate violence serve?
Jeanette came back upstairs and put her arm around Lena. They were both shivering and could not look away. They said nothing; no more could be done. Everything that made sense had already been said, reported to headquarters and the UN. What lingered was a feeling of helplessness and rage with nowhere to go.
Lena later asked herself why she did not try to take any photographs. But with the distance and the nightfall, and the limited range of her lenses, it wouldn’t have translated into useful information for anyone who hadn’t been there. It wouldn’t have been good for evidence either. Even if she had taken photographs, they would have been too late to save lives.
Is this how Stefan had felt? She thought about him, her old photographer friend who had killed himself. Thought about him more and more, when she was in Darfur.