Not on Our Watch (7 page)

But having seen the early results of genocidal policies in Darfur, I felt compelled to speak truth to power, to Al-Jazeera, to the world. Damn the personal consequences.

I made it out of Khartoum in one piece, thanks to one of the Marines from the US embassy who rushed over soon after the bellhop rousted me out of my troubled reveries. He drove me to the airport and made sure I got out safely. In the three years since then, the regime hasn’t given me a visa to go to Sudan legally. Nonetheless I’ve gone back repeatedly into rebel-held areas of the country, gathering stories, trying to shine a spotlight on some of the world’s worst atrocities.

Sudan is indeed where all the world’s worst atrocities come together, like a perfect storm of horrors. War, slavery, genocide—you name it. But particularly genocide. Beyond the Sudanese government and other perpetrators of mass atrocities, however, the ‘bad guys’ in this story are apathy, ignorance, indifference, and inertia. It is up to us to overcome them.

Darfur represents the first genocide of the 21st century. The 999 call has gone out again. And people in Western or First World countries, particularly younger ones, are starting to respond in ways I could never have imagined 20-something years ago. Across the First World, people are objecting to a political system which has made responding to Darfur a low priority, and they are succeeding in overcoming the apathy based on sheer ignorance of the situation. At the public education events I participate in at campuses across the US, students come up to me now with the same look I had back in the 1980s when I first saw the pictures of the Ethiopian famine. They say how they are inspired by the crisis to do more, from just doing something immediately like writing a letter, all the way to changing their majors and their career ambitions to pursue human rights advocacy, conflict resolution, or humanitarian action. In person and in e-mails, they express a desire to get involved somehow, to lend their hearts, minds, and commitment to the ultimate just cause, and to live a meaningful life. The hunger out there for meaning is extraordinary. It is perhaps the most fulfilling part of my work. We’ve gone through Generation X and Generation Y, but if Generation Z is in formation, and the massive outpouring of student action over the Darfur genocide is any indication, we have very good reason to hope in the future.

When I first went to Africa and saw the extraordinary suffering, the massive numbers of people that had been forsaken and forgotten, what little connection I felt with God disappeared. Like so many others that have witnessed such scenes of absolute deprivation and unfairness, I became angry at any construct that would have a god somehow in charge of all this. That angry and studied agnosticism held for nearly two decades. It has only been in the last three years, corresponding ironically to the time of the Darfur genocide, that I have begun to reconnect to my faith.

I remember going into a cathedral in Khartoum during that fateful trip in the summer of 2003. There I witnessed a vigil of hundreds of southern Sudanese praying for peace. I stayed after everyone had left and knelt in the pew, reading stories from the Gospels about Jesus, about redemption, about second chances, about forgiveness, about sacrifice, the themes that resonate so powerfully with southern Sudanese. I remember watching the pigeons (They looked like doves. Wait a minute, are doves actually pigeons? Are pigeons actually flying rats? Never mind, you get the point.) flying around in the church, as I reflected on the mistakes I had made in my life and the sadness I had caused, hoping that this redemption was real. And mostly I just felt an emptiness born of 20 years of travelling and battling, often on my own, in my personal and professional life, and I felt a peace creeping in as I read about Jesus’ life and his teaching. Though the particular window through which I view God is Christianity, surely only just one window into the divine, one of the most gratifying things about working on Darfur issues in the US is the way people of all major faiths—particularly Muslims, Jews, and Christians—come together in respect and partnership around a common cause and are motivated by their faith to pursue what is right.

Early on, I had been a bit incredulous as to the real possibilities of citizen action in moving governments to act. Then, as I saw student and religious groups and others really responding and mobilising to these different crises, and as I started to see policy change, I began to believe in the power of ordinary people to make a difference. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but if these students and the thousands of other new activists on behalf of the defenceless have their way, the first genocide of the 21st century might also be the last, or at least the last one that doesn’t provoke an appropriately strong response.

DON:

Our first day in Africa is pretty much a bust as far as me doing anything of real substance. We all have a very brief briefing in the Le Meridien hotel banquet room, where we are brought up to speed on the latest developments in the region by US Ambassador Marc Wall. Though the Nightline camera is rolling, no one appears to be playing to the folks at home. Everyone is focused on the task at hand; it’s all business. The briefing yields little more than my research has already revealed, and I am looking forward to going out to the desert to see what I came to see. The meeting wraps up in relatively short order, and we pile into our escorted cars and head out to meet Prime Minister Moussa Faki of Chad.

There is much pomp and circumstance when we arrive, but the moment is followed by confusion as it becomes evident that all in our company are not welcomed into the tiny room where this meeting is to be held. I never did find out if the prime minister’s representatives’ decision-making process was based on our perceived hierarchy or if it was simply that the room was too small to accommodate us all. Regardless, I offer to stay outside, not nearly as excited about listening to a political figure as I am about listening to the stories from the people on the front lines of the conflict. I slightly bow my head respectfully and try to back out but I’m grabbed at the last second by Congresswoman Watson, who must’ve thought I was being polite because she pulls me in behind her. Before I can protest, the door is shut on all of us in the stuffy little room and the prime minister’s man begins to speak. Apparently, I’m not going anywhere.

The setup was very interesting, with the prime minister sitting at the front of the room dressed in what I believe to be traditional finery, swatting at small flying pests with a horse-tailed wafter, his assistant standing next to him in an ill-fitting suit. The meeting went on for what felt like an hour and maybe was. Prime Minister Faki was speaking in slow, even, thoughtful tones, almost as if he believed the pace of his speech might help us to better understand his language, but all the monotone cadence did for us in this hot little room was hasten our way toward the heavy-lidded respite that after over 20 hours of travel we all so very much crave. Between my super long blinks—blinks I tried to disguise by nodding my head thoughtfully up and down as if deeply affected by the words his equally inflection-less translator was spooning out—I caught sight of my fellow travel companions also bobbing for sleep, Ms Watson chief among them. When she and I finally made eye contact, I mouthed, ‘Thank you,’ getting a shrug in return. If she had known what we were in for, I’m sure we both would have opted to stay and play with the kids who had shown up outside the gates almost the second our cars pulled into the compound. It wasn’t that the information we were receiving was irrelevant to our trip, but the manner in which it was disseminated was for me strangely similar to the way many politicians on this side of the world do their thing: too many words representing too little action for too few (my present company excluded, of course). I wished we could have forgone all of this diplomacy and gone right into the camps, but that’s a lot like being without transportation and needing to catch a ride to the bank with your friend. If he wants to stop at the cleaners first, it’s better just to grin and bear it. Tomorrow will come soon enough.

It doesn’t. Though we’re leaving at the crack of dawn, the time change, nerves, excitement, or a combination of all three has me up way before the sun, far earlier than any self-respecting farmer would dare begin his chores. Tired of tossing and turning, I sit up and turn on the TV. Just three channels work on the set; two of them have the same program, CNN news, and the other one is in Arabic, but somehow just having the fuzzy thing on helps to calm me down a little bit. I try to get into the real images on the screen so that the imagined ones of traumatised refugees can recede into the background. Being this close to it has me spooked now, or maybe it’s the local gendarme standing guard outside my door with a machine gun for my ‘protection’ that’s working my nerves. Heavy. I sit staring at the screen until the phone rings for my wake-up call a half hour later. It’s 4.30am.

We convene in the hotel’s modest banquet room once again, and everyone’s pretty chatty this morning despite the early hour. The feeling in the breakfast line is one of purpose, the primary goal of our travel just hours away.

After a short drive up the road, we’re back at the airstrip, this time headed first to Abeche, where we will deplane and then board a smaller aircraft before continuing on to Tine, a town on the Chad/Sudan border where the African Union has one of their outposts. We board the Beechcraft 1900 and everybody picks a seat. John sits behind me to the left. He’s furiously writing away on anything that will hold ink—napkins, scraps of paper, gum wrappers ... I ask to trade seats with Betty McCollum so I can get a closer look at John’s Russell Crowe–like
Beautiful Mind
behaviour.

‘What is all that?’ It takes him a second to shift gears.

‘Hey, Buddy. Just trying to collect my thoughts here.’ I gather from all the references to Darfur I can make out on the scraps of paper that John wants to make sure he’s ready for the cameras. But it’s not a ruse; the man knows his stuff.

‘Thrall me with your acumen,’ I say, hitting him with a poor Tony Hopkins impersonation as Hannibal Lecter from
The Silence of the Lambs.

‘Do what to my what?’

‘It’s from
Silence of ...
Forget it. What are you writing about?’

3

Sudan’s Backdrop to Genocide

As we stood together in Darfur’s golden sand, the stark reality hit us squarely over the head: the Sahara is rolling slowly southward. The desert is advancing, rendering access to basic resources such as land and water a matter of life or death. If you have access to those resources or the support of those in political power, you survive. When there is no democracy, no peaceful way of accessing power, then in Sudan, as in so many other places around the world, people pick up guns to win back their rights. In Darfur, the government of Sudan armed that country’s far deadlier version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Janjaweed, a mixed bag of bandits and racist ideologues whose ethnic cleansing of all non-Arab people is mostly motivated by the desire to take over land and steal livestock. John has talked with young Janjaweed recruits. They felt they had no economic alternative. These were the same feelings of the young members of the militias that committed the genocide in Rwanda. Cynical leaders can exploit economic destitution and desperation, and like macabre, racist pied pipers lead people right over the moral cliff.

Since achieving independence from Great Britain in 1956, Sudan has been a country at war with itself. The genocide in Darfur is only the latest in a series of horrific conflicts. Sudan’s civil wars unfold in a depressingly familiar pattern. The Khartoum government’s counter-insurgency strategy has nearly always begun with killing and displacement on a massive scale. When the international community starts to take notice and the spotlight shines on government atrocities, the regime then scales back the military assault and the chess game begins. They manipulate ethnic dynamics, sowing internal divisions within the opposition. They manipulate American, European, and African diplomats, buying time through disingenuous negotiation to gain the upper hand on the battlefield. And they manipulate humanitarian assistance, hiding behind the iron curtain of state sovereignty to deny humanitarians access to territory where vulnerable civilians need help.

The ruling National Islamic Front (known today as the National Congress Party) has taken state-sponsored brutality to extraordinary levels, but the systematic hoarding of wealth and power by elites in Khartoum and the endless violent campaign to silence a deprived and angry population have deep historical roots.

Colonial Times—Sowing Seeds of Discord

Sudan is the largest country in Africa, straddling the cultural divide between the Arab and Arab-influenced societies of northern Africa and the societies south of the Sahara. Sudan’s geography and its 41 million citizens are correspondingly diverse. Follow the Nile River from Sudan’s northern border with Egypt to its southern border with Uganda and you travel from scorching desert landscapes to swamps and rain forests. The people you meet along the way are equally varied. More than 50% of Sudanese describe themselves as black or ‘African,’ and nearly 40% are Arabs. Sunni Muslims are 70% of the population and Christians are at least 5%, with the remainder adhering to traditional belief systems.

From the early 15th until the 20th century, the northwestern region of Darfur was a prosperous independent kingdom of the Fur people. (In Arabic,
Dar
means ‘home’ and Darfur therefore is ‘home of the Fur.’) Successive Fur leaders, called sultans, extended the kingdom’s control southward from the Sahara. Colonialism put borders around Sudan’s diverse geography and people for the first time, creating a number of difficulties. In 1899, Britain and Egypt assumed joint authority over Sudan: Britain managed affairs in the south and let the Egyptians control the north. As a result, the two regions developed unique cultural and religious characteristics. While the Egyptians encouraged the spread of Islamic values in the north, the British developed a ‘Southern Policy’ to reduce Islam’s influence, encouraging Christian missionaries to work and promoting the English language in southern Sudan. In 1916, the British government decided to extend its own control to include Darfur, and the colonial administration annexed the sultanate. Working through local political leaders, the British established a so-called ‘Native Administration’ that loosely controlled Darfur.

When the British government began to withdraw from Sudan after World War II, British officials reconnected the north and south and handed power to the northern elites. Northern Sudanese officials quickly replaced the British administrators in positions of influence in the south. At this time, Darfur was arguably less developed than the south, and the people of Darfur were suspicious of any central authority in Khartoum. Southerners were equally wary of northern intentions. The consolidation of power in the northern city of Khartoum at the expense of the south and the west only confirmed this distrust. The battle lines were drawn, and southerners rioted and rebelled in 1955, just before independence.

Sudan’s First Civil War—A Nation Born into Conflict

Internal conflict overshadowed any celebration when Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956. Two years later, the national army took power by force. General Ibrahim Abboud’s regime crushed political opposition and began efforts to Islamise the south through violent proselytisation. Southern ex-soldiers and policemen formed a guerrilla army—the Anya-Nya (meaning ‘snake poison’ in the local Dinka language)—to resist northern aggression. The Anya-Nya found sympathy among the southern population. Soon, the government’s violent counter-insurgency intensified into full-blown civil war between the government’s forces and the rebels.

In October 1964, a popular uprising in the north toppled the military regime, but new civilian leadership failed to reach a political settlement with the south and the war intensified. Throughout the mid to late 1960s, numerous foreign powers began to funnel money and weapons to the government, to the Anya-Nya, or to both. As in many African countries, the Cold War was not ‘cold’ at all. The government maintained its close ties to the Middle East, but the Soviet Union would become Khartoum’s main patron. Even in 1969, when the military again took power by force, General Jaafar al-Nimeiri’s new government increased Sudan’s trade with the Soviet Union and other communist states. Khartoum relied on Moscow for weapons, and Moscow asserted its strategic influence in the region. Meanwhile, the Anya-Nya rebels drew support mainly from Israel and from neighbouring countries such as Congo, Uganda, and Ethiopia.

When communists failed in a July 1971 coup attempt, Khartoum’s ties with the Soviets deteriorated and its relationship with the United States and Western Europe improved. Without Soviet military support, Nimeiri recalculated the attractiveness of war with the south and conditions for peace improved. Just months after the failed coup, Nimeiri’s government entered direct negotiations with the Anya-Nya in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In March 1972, the two sides ratified the Addis Ababa peace agreement which provided substantial power and wealth sharing between the two sides. Darfur at this time was neglected by Khartoum and desperately impoverished, and the Addis Ababa agreement was not the first peace deal in Sudan that failed to resolve the root causes of conflict in all of Sudan, namely the hoarding of wealth and power in Khartoum.

A War Interrupted

Unfortunately, peace in Sudan did not hold for long. Though a military strongman, Nimeiri had very little popular support in the north. A group of powerful Islamists, supported by Libya among other governments, formed a strong and organised northern opposition. Sadiq al-Mahdi, a former prime minister, led another failed coup attempt in 1976. Nimeiri’s subsequent attempts to appease the Islamists and generate political support among northerners led him to appoint al-Mahdi and several leading Islamist opposition leaders to important government posts (usually at the expense of southerners who had achieved their positions under the Addis Ababa agreement). Nimeiri allowed opposition leaders living in exile to return to Sudan, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical religious fundamentalist organisation. The extremist Islamist scholar Hassan al-Turabi became attorney general, and an Islamist influence spread within the government.

The pressure from the Islamists to renege on the peace agreement was compounded by the discovery of oil in southern Sudan. Driven by greed, northern elites sought to monopolise and maximise oil profits: they resented the provisions in the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south a degree of financial autonomy as well as the right to collect the central government’s taxes on commercial activity there. Nimeiri’s increasingly uncompromising cabinet demanded that he replace southern troops with northerners in areas with significant oil deposits. Then he stole southern proceeds from an oil licensing deal and set in motion plans for a pipeline to take oil from the south to Port Sudan, for export or for processing in northern refineries.
[1]
These attempts to cut southerners out of the oil profits exacerbated underlying tensions.

Southerners began to express their frustration with the Nimeiri government, and northerners became increasingly anxious about the power of southerners in the military. In January 1983, Nimeiri ordered a southern-based battalion to abandon their weapons and redeploy to the north. The troops refused their orders, negotiations to resolve the dispute failed, and in May 1983 Nimeiri ordered his army to attack the insubordinate southern troops. Outmanned and outgunned, the mutineers fled with their weapons, and similar uprisings and desertions continued across southern Sudan. The southerners sought refuge in neighbouring Ethiopia and united to form the opposition Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Return to War: The Sudan People’s Liberation Army and National Islamic Front

On 5 June 1983, Nimeiri issued an order that annulled the Addis Ababa agreement. In what is now a familiar pattern of betrayal, the government of Sudan simply turned its back on a signed treaty, and regional autonomy was instantly wiped out. Khartoum re-established and consolidated control over the administration, finances, and armed forces of the south. Further, Nimeiri’s order declared Arabic, not English, the south’s official language. Later that year the Nimeiri government passed the infamous ‘September laws’ that transformed Sudan into an Islamic state, imposing Islamic law (Sharia) on the entire country and subjecting even non-Muslims to harsh penalties. The result—another civil war.

Southerners rallied behind the SPLA and its charismatic leader John Garang, who was a member of the Dinka ethnic group, the largest group in southern Sudan. Orphaned at the age of ten, he joined southern rebels in the first civil war when he was only seventeen. Always an excellent student, he left Sudan to complete his secondary education in Tanzania and won a scholarship to study in the United States.

He returned to Sudan to rejoin the rebels. After the Addis Ababa agreement, he joined the Sudanese military and rose quickly through the ranks. When southern troops mutinied in May 1983 and formed the SPLA, Garang emerged as the movement’s natural leader. His vision for Sudan was broader than simple demands for southern autonomy. Instead, he sought to transform Sudan into a democratic state that respected the diversity of its citizens.

Civil war escalated between the government and the SPLA, and a new civilian government was installed in Khartoum. Under Garang’s leadership the southern rebels took control of much of southern Sudan. Yet by June 1989, as both sides recognised that total victory would be nearly impossible, a constitutional conference to address the south’s grievances and end the war seemed imminent. Meanwhile, as we will see below, simmering resentments and escalating violence in Darfur were largely ignored.

Later that month, however, Sudanese dreams of a lasting peace were dealt a near fatal blow on 30 June. Brigadier General Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir seized power in a military coup engineered by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and its front man, the former attorney general Hassan al-Turabi. The Bashir government moved swiftly to violently crack down on political dissent, abolishing parliament, banning opposition political parties, arresting opposition political leaders, and clamping down on the press. Anyone who was judged a threat to the Islamists faced arbitrary detention. Most gruesomely, the government tortured and killed its opponents in secret ‘ghost houses’ and prisons.
[2]

The National Islamic Front pursued with renewed vigour the radical agenda to make Sudan—north and south—an Islamic state. Non-Muslims in the south would be converted through the barrel of a gun if need be, as the government intensified the war with the SPLA and, ultimately, with the people of southern Sudan. The crimes committed by the National Islamic Front during the next 15 years of civil war put Bashir’s Islamo-fascist government alongside Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, and the genocidal government in Rwanda as one of the 20th century’s most murderous regimes.

It was during this war with Garang and the SPLA rebels that the Sudanese government practised and perfected the genocidal violence that it later unleashed on Darfur.

The Second Civil War—Sharpening the Tools of Genocide

Divide and Destroy

Government officials, especially members of the pervasive military intelligence services, sowed and continue to sow divisions and increase tension between the ethnic groups that oppose the Sudanese government. The logic is simple: rebels are less effective in fighting a civil war with Khartoum if they are fighting among themselves. And if the motivations of the government are genocidal, as is often the case in Sudan, exploiting ethnic tensions and pitting one group against another is an effective way to exterminate people from certain ethnic backgrounds.

In its war with the SPLA, the government skilfully engineered ethnic splits within the rebels and encouraged a ‘war within the war.’ Military planners in Khartoum devised a counter-insurgency strategy that used ethnically based militias against the SPLA rebels and civilians who supported them in the south. The government armed, trained, and provided logistical support for horse-mounted militias, giving these proxy forces total impunity and encouraging them to attack civilians from Garang’s Dinka ethnic group. (Although other ethnic groups belonged to the SPLA, the Dinka were considered the rebels’ backbone.)