Once-prosperous Sudanese scavenge to survive
FURAWIYAH, Sudan -- Rummaging through the ashy debris of this abandoned village in a dingy gray suit, Moussa Safi is like a ghost in a ghost town.
Safi often walks from his hiding place in the hills to this ransacked village in Northern Darfur State, scrounging for handfuls of millet and sorghum that Arab fighters, in their haste, neglected to loot or burn. As one of Furawiyah's wealthiest men, he lived in a sprawling compound of red-rock drywall and thatched roofs and separate living quarters for each of his three wives. Now only the stone walls remain.
"The Arabs destroyed the whole town looking for things to steal, and burned what they couldn't carry with them. I have nothing now," said Safi, 68.
The village lies within territory now controlled by the Sudanese Liberation Army, or SLA, a rebel group that has battled government troops as well as Arab militia forces for 18 months in a conflict that has left up to 50,000 dead and displaced 1.5 million people in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
Parts of the region are outside the reach of Sudan's government, which has limited access by foreign journalists and aid workers to closely monitored visits focusing on refugee camps and the aid efforts. The rebels escorted several journalists across the Chad border and into the contested area last week, offering a rare glimpse of the horrific conditions.
Sudden reversals of fortune are common in this region of western Sudan, where people live by the fertility of the soil and the generosity of the wells, much as their ancestors did. Furawiyah was one of Northern Darfur's few symbols of stable prosperity.
It had a clean and seemingly limitless supply of groundwater; thousands of goats, cattle, and camels; a bustling market; and huge farms of millet and sorghum surrounded by rocky hills that hold back the desert.
Then Sudanese planes bombed the village in February in its campaign to crush the rebels, according to villagers. Nearly all 4,000 inhabitants scattered into the hills, paving the way for what they said was a two-week looting rampage by government troops and Arab janjaweed militias that killed at least 16 men. Now, Furawiyah stands as just another crumpled, empty village, one among hundreds of black African villages in Darfur destroyed by government forces and the janjaweed.
The Sudanese government has tried to distance itself from the atrocities in Darfur, repeatedly denying its support for the janjaweed and asserting that reports of violence are exaggerated. But villagers corroborated accounts given by Sudanese refugees in Chad of the killing, bombing, and widespread looting by the janjaweed with the support and guidance of the Sudanese Army.
"This is what the government doesn't want you to see," SLA spokesman Bahar Ibrahim said as he stood next to a keg-sized unexploded bomb that, according to villagers, a Sudanese Air Force Antonov plane dropped six months ago. "It was not the janjaweed who left this here; it was the government bombing civilians."
Bomb craters and partially exploded bombs line the village. Dozens of shells from rocket-propelled grenades and bullet casings are scattered.
In a rocky ravine less than an hour's walk from the village, at least 12 bodies lay rotting in the scorching sun. The backs of the skulls of some are shattered. Villagers identified them by their clothing and the leather ornaments they were wearing as ethnic Zaghawans, a black African ethnic group targeted by the janjaweed.
"Government soldiers brought these men here and shot them. We can't bury them yet because we don't know their names," said Hassan Azadin, 68, who lived in Soboli-Gorbo, one of several villages near Furawiyah where, residents say, the government-backed janjaweed has attacked repeatedly since March.
The looting that invariably follows the janjaweed raids is used to pay off the militias and finance more raids, according to several analysts. The wealthier the village, the higher priority the target.
Sudan's Arab Islamist government armed and supported the janjaweed ostensibly to put down a 2003 uprising by SLA rebels resentful of a government that for years usurped the meager wealth of the Darfur region while marginalizing the black Africans who produced it. The rebels say they are fighting for more political power and a fair share of Sudan's $1 million-a-day oil revenue. Extremists within the SLA say they want regime change in Khartoum.
Equipped by Sudan as a proxy army to help crush the rebellion, Darfuris say, the janjaweed rarely choose targets where they are likely to encounter rebels. Instead, they have focused their attacks on unarmed civilians, with the aim of driving them off the land.
"For five generations we lived in peace, but in the past few years the Arabs who came here to water their herds would tell us this would be theirs one day. We didn't believe them," said Ahmed Arajah, 58, a farmer and shop owner from Hangala, a nearby village demolished by the janjaweed and government troops.
Only four of the village's nearly 200 huts are relatively intact. As for the rest, only the stone walls remain. Within them are broken bowls and teacups, burnt grain, and empty, melted soda bottles.
More than 200,000 Sudanese have crossed into Chad, where aid groups struggle to feed and house them -- a situation made worse by the arrival of the rainy season. Many of the region's dirt roads are impassible, cutting off supplies of food and medicine.
Within Sudan, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese hide in tattered shelters in Darfur's boulder-strewn mountains, venturing from their hide-outs to scavenge. The pursuit of water for themselves and what's left of their livestock forces many of the displaced to return to the wells of destroyed villages.
In Shiga Karo, a rebel-held village about 40 miles east of Furawiyah, hundreds of women and children are encamped along a tree-lined riverbed. Last week rebel soldiers distributed sacks of corn flour to some of the displaced, but still many of the children show signs of malnutrition: pencil-thin legs, puffy feet, and distended bellies.
The mothers, weakened by the lack of food and some by the emotional trauma of being raped or seeing their husbands or sons killed, are barely able to produce breast milk for their babies.
"Where are they supposed to go? They don't have the means to go to Chad, and they don't want to run to the camps of a government that is killing them," said Suliman Hassid, 87, chief of the village. Although it is protected from janjaweed attacks by a ring of hills, Shiga Karo has suffered repeated bombings by Antonovs.
Six people were killed in those attacks, and the village is nearly deserted. Only a few herds of goats and camels remain.
Even though SLA rebels control large swaths of Northern Darfur, few people have returned to their villages, fearing reprisals by the janjaweed and the government. And despite the Khartoum government's pledge to abide by a recent UN resolution and rein in Arab militias by the end of the month, the violence continues.
More of Darfur's black Africans, who make up a majority of the region's more than 6 million people, are being swept off their land, deeded to them by Sudan's British administrators before independence in 1956.
"Under the British, we thought we were Sudanese living in Sudan. But later, under the Arabs, we discovered we were just slaves," said the fiery Hassid, who vowed never to leave the village of his ancestors. "How can we trust the Arabs anymore? How can there ever be peace now?"
In Furawiyah, Safi used his walking stick to point out his safe on the ground near one of his demolished market stalls. More than $30,000 in Sudanese dinars, his life savings, was missing.
"As a Muslim, I was taught to treat people with respect and honesty. That was also important to me as a businessman," Safi said. "The janjaweed are also Muslims, but what they teach us is that Islam is for Arabs, not for blacks."
