The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (18 page)

Despite the way they seemed happy to talk to each other about me, Chad and Sudan were getting close to war again. “Rebels” who were actually proxy troops for Sudan were gathering inside Chad; heavy fighting was going on east and southeast of N’Djamena, where everyone believed an attack would come soon. People packed the bridge to Cameroon; families herded animals and carried bundles of all sizes; honking cars and buses with household goods piled on top and held from windows pressed the crowds along the bridge. Overloaded boats filled the river. Most of the small shops in the city closed, and the sound of the city now was of window shutters being nailed closed.

At this time came the news of my father’s death. He had heard about my imprisonment and could not eat. By the time I was free, it was too late for him. The rebels who are not rebels would advance on N’Djamena again. My friends in government would inform me that Chad would soon arrest me and send me to Sudan in exchange for a spy. Megan in New York called and said she would help. A human rights lawyer from Washington called me when he got her e-mail. I was on the phone with him when the rebels were near the city again. I considered crossing the little bridge into Cameroon, but Chris the lawyer said they were working with the U.S. Embassy and the U.N. refugee agency to get me out, perhaps to the United States, where I could continue my work in a new way, and someday return as my people returned. I told him the rebels might be in the city in an hour or so, and that could be bad for me. I said
Chad security might arrest me soon. He said if I went across the bridge all would be lost legally. Ali’s family threatened to imprison me unless I could pay for the truck, an expensive truck.
National Geographic
was sending a check someday for that. I finished my call with Chris and closed the phone and said to myself,
Well, so very far away—I give these kind people about a one percent chance of helping me in time
. And then I realized that, for me, that was pretty good. And it was enough.

Leaving Africa was not simple, of course. Even after being whisked from N’Djamena, I had to be interviewed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security people in Ghana and wait for a letter of transit. A misstep landed me in jail—more waiting. The day finally came. I stood atop a tarmac stairway, looked out over Africa, and smelled the air of it enough to last me for a while. I would work now in other ways to help get the story out and help return the people to Darfur and their homes in peace. What can one person do? You make friends, of course, and do what you can.

This book is in your hands because editors Jonathan Jao and Jennifer Hershey of Random House saw something about my story in a
New York Times
column by Nicholas Kristof. So if you know these people, you should thank them when you see them, as I thank them now. I did not know how to write a book, but my friends said, “Don’t worry, Daoud; we will help you,” and they did. So thank you, Megan and Dennis, very much. And I thank Gail Ross and Howard Yoon, who are, respectively, a literary agent and a literary editor in Washington, D.C., who warmly gave me very good advice.

This book is in your hands mostly because I was alive to write it. For this I must thank Philip Cox; Paul Salopek; lawyer Christopher Nugent of Washington, D.C.; Megan McKenna; the amazing people of the American embassies in Sudan, Chad, and Ghana; Lori Heninger; Jack Patterson; Nicholas Kristof and my reporter friends in many countries;
my friends in Cairo and an old jailer in Aswan; my cousins in Africa and in the United States and Europe; Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and Bill Richardson of New Mexico; my late father and my late brother, Ahmed; and all my friends in Africa, some of whom I pray will forgive me for mentioning them only by nicknames, which was done to protect them. How in one life can I return the blessings of all this friendship?

If I can presume some bond of friendship between us, my reader friend, let me ask you to think of the fact that tonight as I write this, and probably as you read this, people are still being killed in Darfur, and people are still suffering in these camps. The leaders of the world can solve this problem, and the people of Darfur can go home, if the leaders see that people everywhere care deeply enough to talk to them about this. So, if you have the time, perhaps you can do so. For it has no meaning to take risks for news stories unless the people who read them will act.

—D
AOUD
H
ARI
January 2008

The Darfur situation can be very confusing without a little extra information. This is what you would know if you were almost any Sudanese talking politics with your friends in an outdoor bar or at a university.

When the British left Sudan in 1956 they set it up with a small Arab minority government ruling over a mostly non-Arab African population.

The indigenous Africans had in fact already begun a revolt in 1955, the year before independence was final. The war, mostly in the south, lasted until 1972, when a peace agreement allowed limited self-government for the southern region of Sudan. A Southern Regional Assembly was established for that purpose, and it was to have control of much of the expected oil revenue from the fields just then discovered by Chevron Corporation in the south.

In 1983, after ten years of peace, Sudan’s president, Gaafar Nimeiri, nullified this agreement, disbanding the
Southern Regional Assembly and imposing federal rule everywhere. New districts throughout Sudan would be ruled by military governors. The oil revenue, still unseen, would be controlled by the federal government in Khartoum.

Rebel groups quickly formed again. To make things worse, Nimeiri decreed that harsh Islamic sharia law would be imposed throughout Sudan, even over non-Muslim citizens in the south. These laws called for the amputation of hands for minor thefts, for the stoning of women, and many other cruelties. This angered the mass of people, who are quite moderate, and it angered the rebels, who now had three issues: a return to secular government, not sharia law; better representation for indigenous Africans, especially in the south; and a fair local share of the expected oil wealth, including oil jobs and more schools, roads, and clinics.

This political anger joined with the anger of hunger, as these were years of an intense African famine. An uprising in the spring of 1985 overthrew Nimeiri and caused the election of a parliamentary government led by moderate Sadiq al-Mahdi. He suspended sharia law, although it continued to be enforced by some local Arab administrators. Because of the lingering of sharia law, and because the other political issues of representation were still not fixed, the rebel groups didn’t disband.

Four nervous years followed. The oil fields could not be put into production during these years because occasional rebel attacks sent Chevron away. Sudan, sagging under heavy debt from the Nimeiri years, could not pay its loans and was cut off from further help by the International
Monetary Fund. Sudan wanted to become a big oil player, but was still a poor relation among the Arab governments. So Mahdi called a new peace agreement that was expected to further subdue sharia law and perhaps reestablish self-rule in the south. That would let the oil production go forward.

Just before the conference, Mahdi was overthrown and exiled by a military strongman, General Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, who is still in power. He resumed the expansion of sharia law, shut down opposition newspapers and political parties, and imprisoned dissidents. This was a big shock to everyone. I was in high school at the time, and all of us wanted to fight it.

Under the sharia law of Bashir, a woman today cannot leave the country without the written permission of her father or husband. Men and women must sit in separate areas of public buses. The army has been purged of unbelievers. The government-attorney staffs and the courts have been cleansed of those who are not sufficiently loyal to the agenda of Bashir and his right-wing religious brotherhood. Elections have been corrupted. Men and women have been mercilessly brutalized for the most insignificant or unproved deeds. People disappear.

Bashir solved the oil field problem his own way, just as he would later solve his Darfur problem. Many Arab nomads throughout the south had been armed with automatic weapons during the two previous governments as an unsuccessful way of protecting the oil fields from rebel attacks. In the early 1990s, Bashir turned these nomads loose on the non-Arab villages, killing over two million people.

Boys who were out tending their animals far from their villages were the few survivors. They came back to find their fathers dead and their mothers and sisters raped and killed or missing into the slave trade. These boys, after incredibly difficult journeys, found their way to Ethiopia and then to other countries, including the United States, where they are still known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. So the Sudanese government is like this. Bashir is like this.

Communities in the United States, in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe accepted many thousands of these boys and helped them find new lives. This must not be forgotten by Muslims or by anyone.

Bashir built friendly relations with Osama bin Laden and other Islamic radicals, who then opened training camps in Sudan. He turned the oil fields over to the Chinese, who brought their own security people and guns into the now depopulated areas. Here was indeed a good model for economic development without sharing or resistance.

The famine must also be understood, for the weather changes seem permanent now. Beginning in the mid-1980s, nomadic Arabs and the more settled indigenous African tribesmen found themselves in greater than normal competition for the same few blades of grass for their animals, and the same few drops of water in the wells. Arabs drifted south into Zaghawa lands; some Zaghawa drifted farther south into Massalit and Fur tribal lands.

This weather change has created a problem between tribes, and Bashir knows that one of his predecessors lost power because of famine. There are huge reserves of fresh water deep under Darfur. If the indigenous people can be
removed, Arab farmers can be brought in and great farms can blossom. Sudan and Egypt have signed what is called “The Four Freedoms Agreement,” which effectively allows Egyptian Arabs to move into Darfur and other areas of Sudan. New farms might be a good idea if the water could be used wisely and not consumed all at once, but why not let these farms and farmers develop alongside the returned villages of my people? If the traditional people were allowed to pump this water, which they are not, these farms and this food for Sudan would result.

Throughout these recent years, the Arab government has been promoting Arab identity at the expense of Sudanese national identity. Arabs and indigenous Africans have gotten along for thousands of years in Sudan. Even in my own childhood, we feasted in one another’s tents and huts. Any disputes that couldn’t be settled through negotiations between the elders were settled in ritual battles held far from any village so that women and children and the elderly would not be harmed. In addition, there has always been so much intermarriage that it is hard to see the differences between the Arabs and the indigenous Africans. Almost every person, at least in the north half of Sudan and in most of Darfur, is Muslim, so there are no religious differences, either. But the drumbeat of Arab superiority began separating the hearts of the Arabs from their indigenous African neighbors. This should remind people of what happened in Rwanda.

Negotiations between elders to resolve tribal disputes were now harshly discouraged by the government. The Arabs were instead given weapons and military support to
resolve them. While Arabs were being heavily armed by the government, non-Arab villages throughout Sudan were told to give up all their weapons or be destroyed. Darfur has been thick with automatic weapons ever since the 1980s, when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya used Darfur as a staging area for his attacks on Chad in an attempt to expand to the south. The Darfuris, both Arab and African, are good traders, and they found themselves with many of those guns. An estimated fifty thousand Kalashnikov AK-47s, RPG launchers, and M-14 rifles came into Darfur and stayed. The villagers, afraid of what was coming, would not give them up.

Darfur rebel groups bristling with this firepower started talking about Darfur independence after the latest purge of non-Arabs from government, and on April 25, 2003, thirty-three rebel Land Cruisers attacked a government military base to destroy the airplanes and helicopters that had been destroying their villages. In retaliation, President Bashir let loose the dogs of war: the green light was given to armed Arab Janjaweed militia groups. Supported by government tanks, machine-gun-mounted vehicles, additional helicopter gunships, and bombers of the Sudan Army, these Arab militias began attacking and burning indigenous villages not in a sporadic way, but in a systematic way calculated to destroy every village and kill every person. Men, women, and children were killed. Village leaders were burned alive or tortured to death in front of their friends and children. Children were tossed into fires. Wells were poisoned with the bodies of children. Everything had
come into place, politically, environmentally, and culturally for a genocide in Darfur.

You may remember what I told you of this situation in
Chapter 2
: