Is This Your First War? (17 page)

We left all this behind and drove to the outskirts of the city to find Shogar's house. When we got there he was sitting on a white plastic chair on the roof. A handful of SLA fighters who had been injured in Darfur were there, playing cards, their heads wrapped in white turbans with long tails of cloth draped over the their shoulders. They paused and kneeled, touching their foreheads to the floor when the evening call to prayer sounded by a muezzin in a nearby mosque floated over the city, every syllable stretched and musical.
Allah Akbar
. God is great.

Shogar had several satellite phones set up on a flimsy table on the roof. These phones only work when there's an unobstructed path through space between the phone and an orbiting satellite. During the day, his fighters in Darfur sped around the desert in Toyota pickup trucks, phones stashed in pockets or glove compartments. It was impossible to reach them then. But at night SLA guerrillas made camp and the wind died down, allowing signal-blurring dust and sand to settle, and Shogar got up on his roof. All evening he was on his phones, receiving reports, giving instructions. He talked to me between calls. He spoke quietly and evenly, but with the same staged confidence of military men speaking to outsiders everywhere. It was impossible to gauge his sincerity. “Of course we'll defeat them — the government, the janjaweed forces, all of them. It's a matter of time.”

Shogar said he wanted accommodation with his enemies and didn't indulge in talk of ethnic nationalism or revenge. “We're fighting to be equal, to be part of Sudan. Those who rule treat us like third-class citizens.”

“Who do you mean by us?” I asked.

“Darfur. I mean all of Darfur. Even Arabs who are fighting us in the janjaweed, they're also marginalized. The government has manipulated them to fight us because they're ignorant and uneducated. We're trying to bring these fighters to our side. We're trying to recruit anyone who believes in the unity of all Darfurians.”

“How's that going?” I asked.

He barely paused to breathe before answering. “Oh, very well. We're making a lot of progress.”

“Really?”

“Truly.”

Shogar said a column of SLA fighters was active close to the Chadian border near Bahai. I had mixed feelings about sneaking into Darfur with the SLA. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had shut down access to Darfur for Western journalists. The only way to get there was by sneaking in through Chad. But factions of the SLA and the other prominent Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, were periodically switching sides or turning against each other, increasing the risk of being double-crossed and kidnapped. It had happened to another journalist shortly before we got there. Still, it was tempting. We asked Shogar for the SLA commander's satellite phone numbers. Shogar called him up from the roof.

“
Salam alaikum
. Peace be with you. I'm fine.
Hamdullah
. Thanks to God. There are a couple of Canadian journalists with me. They're heading east and may cross the border. They'll be in touch. Look after them.”

The next morning we flew to Abéché with the World Food Program. The sky beneath the twin-propeller plane was cloudless and clear of dust, revealing miles upon miles of desert and scrub on the ground below. Abéché from the air was a sprawl of flat-roofed buildings surrounded by mud walls and the odd tree. The pilot circled the runway outside town once to look for stray animals that might have wandered onto the landing strip and then quickly brought the plane down. We spent the afternoon renting a large white 4x4 and filling its trunk with jugs of water and gasoline. We also hired a local driver — Ahmed, a teenager who Mohammad confided might have been mentally unwell. He grinned a lot and spoke in bursts of garbled French I couldn't understand.

After crashing for a night in Abéché's United Nations compound, we drove out of town early in the morning. The road was packed dirt with paths that split off and rejoined the main route when deep ruts or other obstructions made moving straight ahead impossible. While the landscape looked barren and featureless from the air, on the ground it undulated, with tiny villages, goats, and the odd camel appearing and disappearing on the horizon. We passed trucks overflowing with armed men, some in uniform, some not. It was difficult to know exactly who they were. We were also stopped at a couple of checkpoints, where I began to suspect Mohammad wasn't forthright in explaining that we were journalists rather than aid workers. A camel carcass lay beside the road. Vultures, like enormous flies, walked over it, pecking at its empty eye sockets.

Eventually we reached Farchana, one of the dozen or so camps for Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad. Some 20,000 people lived there. Most had fled homes in Darfur when the janjaweed attacks began in 2003. By November 2006, when we showed up, babies who had been born in the camp were now walking, talking, and chasing each other between the neat rows of canvas tents and fences of woven braches. This wasn't like the makeshift camps inhabited by Afghans who had fled the Taliban, holes scraped out of dirt and covered with plastic and scraps of cloth. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had a field office nearby, though staff there typically vacated the camp by late afternoon, when recruiters for the Sudan Liberation Army moved in, looking for young men, or, failing that, robust children. But after three years, the camp was organized and well run. It had water and latrines, and nobody starved to death.

“I knew the people who attacked us,” Najumi Bashar said, squatting in a patch of shade in the sand outside his tent. It was the first thing he said to me.

“I knew all of them. There had been marriage relations between us. You could say we were friends.”

Bashar belonged to the Masalit tribe, members of which live in western Darfur and eastern Chad. He had once attended university in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, but was back in Darfur raising a family when the war began.

“They came before dawn,” he said. “We were sleeping, and when I woke up the janjaweed, Arabs we knew, were inside the village, riding horses, yelling, burning houses. Sudanese soldiers were outside the village, surrounding us. They were in their vehicles. A couple people were killed. My father was one of them. The rest of us ran away. We left behind our cows and camels. The janjaweed took them.

“We moved to another village nearby where we had relations. They came for us there two days later. They burned the village and others nearby. We moved again. Eventually we crossed the border. Some of us got separated there. My mother and brothers are at another camp. I'm here with my wife and four children. The youngest two were born here. The bigger ones remember that they were born elsewhere, in a good place. They remember that we had gardens.”

A soccer game had erupted among a gang of barefooted children, including Bashar's. Their ball was made from plastic bags and other scraps of garbage that had been rolled and tied together. “I hope to go back,” he said, “but it's not likely now.”

All morning and afternoon we heard stories like this. They differed only in details. The raiders usually came at night. People woke up with their houses on fire. Some got out in time. Others burned to death. Camels and cattle were stolen. Women reported that their sons and husbands were murdered, while they were allowed to flee, alive if not unharmed. They worried that their children would forget dead relatives and abandoned homes.

“Our small children don't remember,” one twenty-four-year-old woman, Halom Ahmed Kharif, said. “We try to explain to them that this is not where we're supposed to live. We describe the villages we've left so that they will hope to go back, too. But it's already been three years.”

At sixty-seven, Mohammad al-Bakir was one of the elders in the camp. He wore a long white tunic, open at the neck, where a leather pouch containing verses from the Quran hung. Many in the camp, even toddlers, wore the same amulets, which they believed would protect them.

“It wasn't always like this,” al-Bakir said. “When I was a young man the Arab nomads would stay at our farms with their animals. We would trade. They would give us food, and we would let their camels graze. We'd live together like that. I think the government introduced problems between us and the Arabs. They gave them weapons, and they began stealing our livestock. We went to the government to complain, but they wouldn't do anything. It got worse. I had a house where my whole family lived. It was burned.”

Few expected their situation to improve or even change. Bashar complained that hundreds of United Nations officials, “the most high people in the world,” had visited the camp and knew what had happened to them, but nothing was ever done about it. The SLA and the JEM were fighting on their behalf in Darfur. But, Bashar said, “they have no political experience.” He didn't think they could help him get home.

We left the camp and drove farther east to Adré, right on the border with Darfur, to meet with members of the SLA who had been fighting in Sudan. They weren't hard to find. All it took were well-placed questions at Farchana and other nearby camps. Mohammad, our translator, was proving to be resourceful and more connected than I had realized. And we had introductions from Adam Ali Shogar back in N'Djamena. Besides, the SLA's presence in eastern Chad was an open secret. We met with several of their fighters in an Adré safehouse. Most nursed recent wounds. Gamar Suliman Adam's leg had been amputated below the knee. He had been shot up by a helicopter gunship during a battle near El Geneina and carried across the border.

“We'll never drop our weapons until we get liberation,” another fighter, Anur Mohammad, said. It was as though he felt obligated to begin each conversation with bravado. He soon toned it down. “By liberation, I mean a role in the government.” He picked at his bandages. “And economic development in Darfur. I'd like a job.”

But even in the midst of the SLA's focus on Darfur, just south of us the war was already expanding into Chad. Villages all along the border were in flames as janjaweed from Sudan joined with local Arab tribes to strike into Chadian territory around Goz Beida. Driving there directly would take us through a war zone. Instead, we backtracked to Abéché and swung south and east from there. The packed dirt road frequently disappeared into swaths of soft sand. We'd push on and hope something resembling a path would re-emerge farther ahead. The landscape was greener than around Abéché and Adré. Trees shaded the road and obscured sightlines. Patches of land all around us had been burned. Ashes, lighter than sand, drifted and swirled like snow. It felt claustrophobic to drive through tunnels of charred and blackened trees. We arrived at a United Nations field office in Goz Beida before dark and pitched tents on the dry dirt inside the compound's concrete walls.

“If we had guns, we would never be living like this. We would go back and fight them,” Abdullah Abdul Karim told me the following morning. He was middle-aged and wore a white cap over the deeply black skin on his head as he crouched in a small shadow made by a thorn tree near a road leading out of Goz Beida. Around him, squatting or sitting on similar patches of shade, were the members of his family and his village, Bakinya, a Dajo tribe settlement about forty-five kilometres away. The Bakinya villagers had no tents or other shelters, no latrines, and little food or water. Because they were Chadians, displaced within their own country rather than refugees from Darfur, there wasn't much international aid organizations in the area could do for them. The NGOs had a mandate to help those who had escaped Darfur, but now Darfur had spread to Chad.

As we approached these makeshift camps earlier that morning, I had noticed young teenagers on donkeys roving along the outskirts of the settlement carrying bows and arrows. I glanced up and saw several quivers full of arrows hanging from the thorn trees as well. The arrowheads looked like they had once been iron nails that were then pounded and flattened to tapered tips. I couldn't resist reaching out to test their sharpness. Karim's fingers were around my wrist a moment later, pulling me away from the quiver.

“The arrows are poisoned,” he said. “A scratch will kill you.”

Embarrassed and a little shaken, I tried to ask Abdullah how the poison was prepared, but Mohammad Rakit, the sixty-seven-year-old imam of the village, interrupted to scoff at their weapons.

“They have machine guns. We have spears and arrows. What can we possibly do?”

Rakit was in the midst of writing verses from the Quran on wooden tablets. When he filled one tablet with the holy words, they were washed off and the inky water was given to the growing number of sick and injured to drink. With Karim, he explained what had happened to their village.

“At first they would only take our cattle,” he said. “Sudanese Arabs crossed the frontier, and then local Arabs guided them to our villages. We armed ourselves with spears and bows and arrows and tried to get our livestock back. We followed their tracks across the border but couldn't reach our animals. But now it is worse. It is no longer only about theft. The Arabs have finished killing in Darfur. Now they are starting here.”

Another villager spoke up to stress that his village had once been on good terms with their Arab neighbours. “We married women from their tribes, and they married women from ours. Then Arabs from Sudan came and convinced the Chadian Arabs to kill the blacks.”

“It's true,” Karim said. “We even used to graze our animals in the same place. But then the Sudanese Arabs would come and taunt us. They'd ask where the slaves kept their cattle, meaning the animals belonging to the black tribes. They'd take these and leave the Arab cattle.”

Several teenaged boys from the village went after the raiders with bows and arrows to retrieve the stolen cattle. One sat near the older men who formed a semi-circle around me, a little farther away, his eyes downcast, and an ugly open wound on his shoulder. He could barely be coaxed to talk. “The animals belonged to us. We went to get them,” he said. Karim explained what was already self-evident. They didn't get the cattle back. The boy was shot.