A displaced girl in Mershing camp, South Darfur.
Story and Photos By Dan Teng'o
The world must not give up on Darfur
Over 200,000 people have been killed and 3 million displaced from the Darfur region in western Sudan over the past three years.
The killings and displacements continue as the Darfur conflict, tagged the first genocide of the 21st century, rages on.
It all started when two mostly non-Arab rebel groups took up arms in early 2003 accusing the central government of neglect.
The rebel groups, Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), attacked government targets and demanded an end to marginalization by the Sudanese government.
A girl draws water from a relief borehole.
The government allegedly responded by sponsoring Arab militias to retaliate by mounting a campaign of rape, murder and pillage.
The militias, known as “Janjaweed” (loosely translated as an evil man with a gun on horseback) combed Darfur’s hamlets, wreaking terror on innocent civilians and sending thousands fleeing into displaced and refugee camps.
Worse, the conflict spilled over the border into neighboring Chad, sending violent ripples across the region.
Three years on, the violence continues unchecked.
The United States has called it genocide; the United Nations has christened it the world’s worst humanitarian crisis; the International Criminal Court is investigating alleged war crimes in the region.
Some analysts have likened it to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the tiny central African nation where an estimated 800,000 to one million people were massacred in 100 days.
Efforts to restore peace in war-torn Darfur have so far come to naught.
In 2004, the African Union, an umbrella body of 53 African countries, moved in to seek an African solution to the crisis.
A section of the Manawashi camp.
Under the AU’s aegis, the warring parties signed a ceasefire pact but none stuck to the agreement. The fighting continued with renewed ferocity, hence heightening the war against the government.
AU troops were deployed to monitor the ineffectual ceasefire and protect civilians. They failed.
Killings and displacements continued across Darfur’s hamlets. The situation lurched from bad to worse as the international community struggled to end another conflict in southern Sudan.
The conflict, running for over 21 years, in southern Sudan had pitted the Sudanese government in the north of the country against rebels from the south, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement. It was the international community’s priority.
Thankfully, it was resolved with a peace agreement signed in Nairobi, Kenya, January 2005.
Buoyed by the successful resolution of the long-running civil war in southern Sudan, a peace process to end the Darfur conflict was set in motion by the AU.
Displaced children at a camp in South Darfur.
Sadly, after yearlong negotiations and international pressure, only one of three negotiating rebel factions signed an AU-brokered peace accord in May 2006.
Many non-signatories formed the new National Redemption Front alliance which renewed hostilities with the government in June.
Fighting rages in various parts of south, west and north Darfur as the government and rebels continue their military campaigns. Security remains the scarcest commodity in Darfur for the war-affected and aid agencies in the area.
Efforts to deploy a 20,000-strong UN peacekeeping force to the region have so far come a cropper.
Washington has led the call urging Sudan to allow a UN force to quell the violence in Darfur, but Sudan has strenuously opposed the move, terming it an attempt to restore colonial rule in the country.
Despite its modest achievements in ensuring the security of civilians in the camps, the 7,000-strong AU force in the region is still too puny and ill-resourced to maintain real and lasting peace in the expansive region the size of France or Texas.
After several extensions, the AU’s mandate in Darfur stops at the end of this year (2006). Many cringe at the thought of the security vacuum that will be left if and when the AU finally departs from Darfur.
Meanwhile, deaths and displacements continue to be a way of life in Darfur.
Ejected from their homes, thousands of displaced families are sheltered in squalid camps across Darfur. They rely solely on relief aid from the 15,000 aid workers and 100 humanitarian agencies that work in the region.
Displaced people share out relief grain at the Kalma camp.
In mid May 2006, at Otash displaced camp, near south Darfur’s capital of Nyala, I found two-week old baby Fatuma crying endlessly in the matronly hands of her grandmother Kaltuma Khatir, out in the open sprawl of new, homeless displaced people.
Though swaddled in tatty pieces of clothes, Fatuma was still exposed to the unrelenting, scorching sun that bakes Darfur everyday. Her grandmother couldn’t find anything else to cover her. Neither could she find any food for her.
Fatuma’s family was displaced only a few hours after she was born at Joagin village, South of Nyala. When I visited Otash, Fatuma’s mother and father (thank God Fatuma had not been orphaned in the attack) had gone out in search of food and shelter.
When they came back, they were empty-handed and dejected.
Disappointed, Khatir continued to rock the crying baby without uttering a word. She had probably seen worse in the two weeks that she had spent in the open with very little to eat and nothing over her head.
Despite the punishing heat, she was determined to spend more days out in the open, as long as her grand-daughter was safe from the mindless violence that sent them packing from their village.
“We can’t go back to our village. It is not safe. They are killing people everyday. I have never seen anything like it before,” said Khatir, desperation written all over her face.
A victim of the Darfur conflict right from birth, Fatuma cried and cried and cried, adding to the cries for peace in Darfur.
“The camps keep swelling all the time because we are receiving newly displaced people every week,” said an aid worker in late October.
“Things seem to be getting worse all the time,” said the aid worker who has served in Darfur for over two years.
In mid-October, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo called on Sudan's government and the international community to act and end the cycle of violence in Darfur.
In an address to African and western diplomats at the headquarters of the African Union (AU) in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Obasanjo—president of the largest contributing country to the AU's protection force in Darfur—set out the need for the AU to hand over to the United Nations there while retaining its African composition.
"It is not in the interest of Sudan nor in the interest of Africa, nor indeed in the interest of the world, for us all to stand by, fold our hands and see genocide in Darfur," Obasanjo said.
Indeed. The world must not give up on Darfur.
The writer:
Dan Teng’o is a graduate student of journalism and mass communication at Kent State University. He worked as a relief worker in Darfur for a year.
How people can assist:
-Lobby for the deployment of a UN peace-keeping force to Darfur.
-Contribute to the numerous humanitarian agencies serving the hurting and long-suffering people of Darfur.
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