Although most Darfuris, especially pastoralists, have become linguistically Arabised, some still speak dialects closely related to Nigerian Fulbe. Some Arab tribes, such as the Rizeigat and Beni Hussein, have resisted government blandishments and have either supported the African rebels or tried to remain neutral. Several pro-government militias still include members of the African Zaghawa tribe. Many Zaghawa were wooed by the government to fight in the separate southern Sudanese conflict and they were long regarded as allies by the Khartoum government.
It was only in and , when numerous Zaghawa villages were ransacked by government-backed Janjaweed militiamen, that Zaghawas began joining the rebels in large numbers. Who then are the Janjaweed? The term is an aggregation of the Arabic words Jinn meaning evil spirit and Jawad meaning mounted rider used for both horseman and camel-riders. So the Janjaweed are "evil spirits on horseback" who looted and ransacked settled villages in what was originally a series of tribal disputes between nomadic Arabs and settled African farmers over land and grazing rights.
Historically, northern nomads were allowed pasture and passage through African farmland along routes established centuries ago. But seasonal drought cycles and pressures of growing population forced pastoralists to impinge more and more on the land of their settled southern neighbours, and in turn forced farmers to fence off their land, triggering increasingly bitter disputes. The situation progressively worsened and has been fanned by political manipulation both from successive Khartoum governments, as well as neighbouring Libyans and Chadians wanting to garner support for wars in Chad.
From onwards, Darfur was an important factor for any government wanting to win elections in Sudan, with the result that opposing political parties in Khartoum manipulated and exacerbated existing tensions between Darfuri Arabs and Africans.
This was despite the fact that Khartoum's "riverine" Arabs, along the Nile, regarded themselves as superior to all Darfuris, whether African or Arab, whom they referred to derogatorily as Awlad al-Gharb progeny of the west [of Africa]. Once in power, following the withdrawal of British colonial rulers in , Khartoum's political elites continued to marginalise Darfur and made little attempt to improve the poor social and economic conditions of the people there.
Libya's President Gaddafi used Darfur as a base for supporting incursions into Chad at various times throughout the late twentieth century.
The Libyans, with their notions of Arab supremacy, favoured Darfur's Arabs and armed them to help support Chadian rebels. Tacit support from the Khartoum government for Libya's Machiavellian tactics deepened resentment of the Libyan and Chadian Arabs among Darfur Africans. The forerunners of today's notorious Janjaweed initially received their arms from Libya or from Chadian rebels. The periodic clashes between nomads and farmers became increasingly violent with the increasing availability of weapons as a consequence of the Libya-Chad war, but only escalated into stark ethnic-based conflict in the final years of the last century and in this new century.
By , numerous Zaghawa had joined the Fur and other tribes who had formed self-defence units to protect their villages and families from marauding Janjaweed horsemen. Most women and children managed to leave the village before the Janjaweed arrived. They were warned of the approach, according to forty-two-year-old Kaltoum, but the Janjaweed went looking for them where they were hiding in the mountains:. One villager, Hassan, said at least twelve men were killed in the village; other sources put the figure as high as twenty-three.
Fifteen people including seven women and six children were reportedly killed outside the village some of them targeted and then shot in cold blood.
Hussein, twelve, was hiding away from the village, behind a tree with three other children, when Janjaweed and soldiers shot him three times in the face, right arm and right leg. Three other children hiding with him were injured at the same time:. Hussein said he did not know who shot him.
They were certainly close enough to see that he was not a full-grown man. There are no Tora Bora in Tullus. It's a village. Hussein's father wrapped him in a blanket and took him on a donkey to Dwelem, some twenty-five miles away, and then to Chad. The three other children were taken by their families to the town of Murnei. In the words of Hussein: "They saw us, they aimed at us, and they shot us.
Terbeba was attacked by army and Janjaweed on February 15, , at a. The village headman, Abdullah, forty-nine, said these forces killed thirty-one people [49] including old men and women and five members of the SLA who arrived to try to defend the village two hours after the attack began. The SLA arrived after two hours, and together with the eight Masalit policemen in the police station put up resistance.
The attackers burned the police station too. From beginning to end, the fighting lasted for eleven hours. In addition to hitting women, the attackers burned one of two mosques and tore up the Qorans in both, according to the headman.
Millebeeda village and area, south-west of Geneina: fifty-nine civilians killed. On February 17, , according to the local tribal leader or omda , thirty-seven-year-old Musa, government soldiers with "big guns" doskhkas and rocket-propelled grenades attacked Millebeeda village together with Janjaweed.
But he quoted villagers as saying "they all wore one uniform". He said thirty-one villagers were killed including four women, three children and a Masalit rebel fighter, twenty-seven-year-old Ibrahim Ismael.
The coordinated attack was conducted by hundreds of army soldiers and Janjaweed who descended on the village from three directions. A villager who witnessed the attack, thirty-year-old Bukhari. I saw my uncle Arbar, forty-five, leave his house, unarmed, and run away.
They shot him from yards. He had four children. Then the police began to resist - there were only seven or eight of them, but they were all Africans - and I succeeded in escaping with my wife and two-year-old son.
On March 5, , government and Janjaweed forces executed at least men belonging to the Fur tribe in Wadi Salih, one of West Darfur state's six provinces. The men were killed on the same day in different places nine Fur chiefs in prisons in Mugjir and Garsila, where they had been taken a week earlier, [58] seventy-one captured Fur men in a valley south of Deleig, and another sixty-five captured men in a valley in the Mugjir area west of Deleig.
The men executed in the valley south of Deleig were part of a larger group rounded up in a number of villages earlier in the day, after being asked their villages of origin. Witnesses said the government and Janjaweed were singling out men displaced from villages that had been previously burned with special emphasis on the Zamey area south of Deleig.
The mass executions in Wadi Salih, one of the gateways to the SLA's headquarters in the Jebel Marra mountains, may have been in retaliation for an SLA attack on government troops in the Mugjir area of the province a month earlier, on February 1, in which the SLA says it killed more than one hundred government soldiers. A survivor of one of the mass killings, a farmer who was shot in the back rather than the neck, told a neighbor that the arrested men were taken, in army trucks and cars, to a valley a few miles south of Deleig.
The neighbor, who can be identified only as Abdul, [61] said people in the heart of the Wadi Salih area woke up on March 5 to find the whole area surrounded by government soldiers and Janjaweed commanded by Ali Kwoshib. Kwoshib reportedly established a Janjaweed base in Garsila in July and, after being given 1, automatic rifles by the army, burned a large area of Wadi Salih.
A similar hunt for men displaced from the burned villages took place in other areas of Wadi Salih. If they were displaced they took them to the police station. On or about the same day as the massacre south of Deleig, March 5, , dozens of these detained men were taken from the police station to a place "south of Wadi Salih [where] there is a hill and near that hill a valley.
They killed seventy-one men there that eveningIt happened in Mugjur just like it happened in Deleig. They took them to the hills and killed them there," he said. In August , Fur villages in Mukjar and Bindisi districts were attacked by Janjaweed and government forces who looted the villages and killed civilians, sometimes after SLA attacks in the area. SLA forces looted the police station of ammunition and machine guns, killed two people including an Arab detainee in the police station and abducted a businessman.
Within a week, police came to Bindisi and a nearby village called Kudung in the early morning and told the population that the "Janjaweed were coming but that nobody should clash with them and all should remain in their houses. Both Bindisi and Kudung were partly burned and destroyed and forty-seven people were killed in the attack. The market and shops were totally looted, and most of the loot was carried away on camel and horseback. Kudung was revisited by the Janjaweed in the early morning several weeks later and the rest of the village was destroyed.
Morepeople were killed, including one child and an old woman who burned to death in her house. The attacks described above are clearly only a fraction of the total number of attacks on civilians and villages in the Wadi Salih area, particularly since there have been further attacks in The government of Sudan has made extensive use of attack aircraft mainly Antonov supply planes dropping crude but lethal "barrel bombs" filled with metal shards, but also helicopter gunships and MiG jet fighters - in many areas of Darfur inhabited by Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa civilians.
Significantly, Antonov bombing has seldom been used along the southern part of the international border with Chad, although there has been significant bombing north around Tine and Kulbus, where two rebel groups have had a presence.
In border areas of Dar Masalit, helicopters and Antonov planes have however, often been used for reconnaissance, both before and after attacks. A twenty-eight-year-old villager, who witnessed the bombardment, Izhaq, said the Antonovs returned the follow ing day, but did not bomb. He surmised this was because the village had been completely destroyed.
But the most lethal confirmed case of aerial bombardment occurred in the town on Habila on August 27, Habila was at the time packed with civilians displaced from villages that had already been cleared among them, Urum, Tunfuka, Tullus, Andanga and Hajjar Bayda. Jamal, a thirty-year-old lawyer, was in Habila at the time visiting family. He said twenty-four people all civilians died in the bombardments, including four of his own relatives: hisbrother Mustafa, twenty-seven; sister Sadiya, twenty-five; and two nephews, Safa, seven, and Ma da, four.
Five other relatives were wounded - his mother Jimhia, two brothers and two nephews. All were civilians. Gunships have been used to reconnoitre villages in advance of ground attacks. On January 5, , a single helicopter gunship flew over Korkoria village, near Geneina. Omar, a thirty-one-year-old farmer, said the gunship was flying at hut-level suggesting it was not expecting any ground fire.
He said it did not bomb. The next day, however, a group of approximately Janjaweed attacked Korkoria, killing four people and leaving only one hut unburned. Gunships have also been used to reconnoitre villages immediately after they have been burned and attacked arriving within one to three days of the initial attacks, according to villagers. Sheikh Abdullah of Terbeba said gunships and Antonovs flew over Terbeba three or four days after the village was destroyed. Millebeeda, too, was deserted.
Human Rights Watch research in Darfur in March and April confirmed reports from refugees in Chad and other sources that Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed have systematically attacked and destroyed villages, food stocks, water sources and other items essential for the survival of Fur and Masalit villagers in large parts of West Darfur.
Villages were not attacked at random, but were emptied across wide areas in operations that reportedly lasted for several days or were repeated several times until the population was finally driven away. Many civilians were killed in the course of these attacks as described in more detail above and below. In one of the areas systematically surveyed by Human Rights Watch in April, all villages were partially or totally burned. Food storage containers and other items necessary for the storage and preparation of food were all destroyed.
The situation was the same in another area surveyed - less systematically, because of the presence of Janjaweed in many of the villages burned - between the villages of Misterei and Bayda. The only civilian life encountered was a terrified group of some fifteen people men and women, all pitifully thin-who were attempting to reach their former village to dig up buried food stores. Many villagers reported having started burying their grain in pits almost ten feet deep in recent months in anticipation of attacks on their villages.
If they see you, they kill you. In some parts of Darfur, Human Rights Watch received reports that Janjaweed forces deliberately dug up and destroyed buried grain in some villages or beat people they found trying to return and salvage these food stocks.
Hundreds of villages have been targeted by the government's campaign of deliberate destruction. On February 7, , Sildi, south-east of Geneina, was attacked, first by air and then by land.
In other incidents documented by Human Rights Watch, up to fifteen villages were attacked and destroyed in a single day as recently as March One farmer from Sildi, year-old Ahmad, said "the Janjaweed came with horses and camels and behind them the army with cars.
Janjaweed on horses killed the men and took the cows. Janjaweed on camels took the sorghum, clothes and beds. Soldiers in four cars were shooting. They killed 13 people including two women, but more died later from their wounds.
Everyone wore uniforms. We saw nothing but uniforms. They said: 'We aren't going to leave any of you here. We are going to burn all these villages. The Janjaweed were wearing government clothes [army uniform]. Without warning, they began to burn the village and shoot civilians.
We put the children on donkeys and on our backs. Some we pushed like cars. They left 80 percent of the village burned. This is the program: they don't want African tribes in this place. The government and Janjaweed forces have implemented a similar pattern of deliberate destruction in Fur areas of West Darfur. Around Bindisi in Wadi Salih province, forty-seven villages were destroyed between November and April Seven of thirteen villages in the Arwalla area and up to forty villages around Mugjir were looted and totally or partially destroyed.
Most of the villagers were forced into neighboring larger towns, almost entirely destitute. In addition to villages and civilian property, the Sudan government has engaged in the systematic destruction of mosques and the desecration of articles of Islam in Darfur. In the past year, government and Janajweed forces have killed imams, destroyed mosques and prayer mats.
In some villages, they have torn up and defecated on Qorans. We pray all the time. We read the Qoran all the time. Yet government forces and Janjaweed have burned at least sixty-five mosques in Dar Masalit [77] and have killed scores of people in mosques.
Janjaweed who attacked Urum in November killed sixteen men as they mourned eighty-year-old Yahya Abdul Karim, and the imam and his orphaned three-year-old grandson. Janjaweed also rode into the mosque i n Mulli and shot dead ten people including the imam, Yahya Gabat. In Sandikoro, a joint army-Janjaweed force tore Qorans and defecated on them.
In Kondoli, they killed the imam, Ibrahim Durra, the second imam, and the muezzin during prayers. While most attacks on villages are carried out by a combination of Janjaweed and government forces, it is the Janjaweed whom villagers blame for the lion's share of the looting that has stripped the Masalit and Fur of much of their wealth primarily cattle, but also horses, goats and sheep.
The difference between the Janjaweed and government looting of recent years and the looting of "Arab nomads" in the past is that much of the looting today is part and parcel of a deliberate policy of forc ible displacement and is usually accompanied by widespread killing. The theft of cows seen by many Masalit as a "reward" to the Janjaweed for "Arabization" services rendered to the government - now goes hand in hand with the deliberate and widespread killing of those of Masalit and Fur ethnicity.
In the words of Asha, a sixty-two-year-old woman from Kudumule village: "The problem bega n ten years ago. It began with the stealing of cows. Two years ago they started killing our men. On April 23, , Janjaweed attacked the weekly market in Mulli, east of Geneina on the Habila road, and killed forty-three people many of them in the mosque. He described how the attackers killed the imam and ten people praying, then shouted racially derogatory invectives as they turned on others:.
Futr, twenty-seven, had gone to Mulli for market day and witnessed the same attack. Musa, twenty-five, was on the eastern side of the market when this attack began. If you refused to hand something over, you were shot. They killed about thirty people in the market. Ali, thirty, said fifty Janjaweed came from the east with camels and horses. There was no army. Some people were praying in the mosque. They shot indiscriminately at everyone.
After that everyone ran away. They stole sugar, meat, everything in the market. They stayed in the market for one hour. No one asked the authorities for redress; they considered the Janjaweed to be the authorities. Futr said about the attackers: "They wore the same uniforms as the army.
Nobody complained to the government. We know these people are from the government. They always say: 'We are the government. Six young men were killed in the village of Gozbeddine on October 1, , following the burning of the village the previous day. Idriss, a forty-three-year-old farmer, said the six returned to the village to collect their cows but encountered the Janjaweed.
The young men tried to run but were killed as they fled. On February 13, , Janjaweed entered the village of Abun to look for cattle. Nearby villages had already been bombed by Antonovs and burned, and Abun was empty but for men who had stayed behind to try to bury food stocks and other non-perishable items in anticipation of being able to return one day. Jamal, a native of Abun, said the Janjaweed killed one man twenty-four-year-old Adam Bakhit and captured and beat ten others, asking them: ""Where are the cows and the camels?
The Janjaweed were divided over whether to kill the prisoners or not. They finally released them and ordered them away from the village for good: "'We don't want to see you again in this place. It is for us, our camels and cows. Leave it soon. Much of today's cattle rustling is organised on an almost industrial scale. Dozens of displaced villagers told Human Rights Watch that stolen cows are gathered in Janjaweed cattle camps or "collection points" the largest of them reportedly at Um Shalaya from where they are driven to the government slaughterhouse in Nyala for export from Nyala, by air, to Arab countries like Libya, Syria and Jordan.
They don't get much return from poor farmers. Killings during looting expeditions are not limited to men, and include women and children. Kudumule, outside Misterei, was attacked, on February 24, He was thirty years old. When he went to get the cattle, they killed him. They also killed his seven-year-old niece, Mariam Ahmad.
Villagers seldom protest Janjaweed actions to army or police, believing the army to be one with the Janjaweed and the police to be ineffectual and powerless. On the rare occasions that they have protested, they have not had satisfaction. Also on February 24, , Janjaweed from outside Misterei looted large numbers of cows from inside the town. Most of these cows belonged to displaced people who had gone to Misterei for safety from the joint government-Janjaweed attacks on villages.
The people appealed for help to the local army chief a Dinka from southern Sudan, known to the Masalit residents only as Ango. At this point, some people left for Chad. Many others followed after the next large-scale looting a month later. It is not just the theft of assets like livestock that send Masalit fleeing to Chad.
For poor people who have few assets, small losses hit hard. Omar, a thirty-seven-year-old farmer from Gokar Aminta, left for Chad after Janjaweed stole his watch in the street. The Janjaweed abused and persecuted those whom they did not expel:. Hawa, thirty-five, was one of those robbed and beaten in her home, then accused of being the wife and mother of SLA rebels to put her in her place.
Displaced Masalit, Fur and Zaghawa civilians and residents in the larger government-controlled towns continue to be assaulted and sometimes tortured by Janjaweed for loot or suspected rebel affiliation even once they have fled their villages in the rural areas. In March in one of the larger towns in Wadi Salih, Janjaweed detained a wealthy Fur community leader, his wife and daughter, beat them all and hung the man upside down with ropes around his neck and arms in an effort to obtain money and goods from the family.
In a case of torture reported from the Garsila area in April, a Fur man was detained and whipped until all the skin was flayed from his back. The whip handle was then used to gouge holes in his flesh. Human Rights Watch also received reports of men being buried alive around Garsila and Deleig by janjaweed members. Displaced people continued to report that Janjaweed committed crimes against them including violent attacks, disappearances, and looting of their remaining livestock.
These crimes have been committed in numerous displaced camps around Geneina, Nyala, and other large towns under government control. Rape appears to be a feature of most attacks in Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa areas of Darfur. The extent of the rape is difficult to determine since women are reluctant to talk about it and men, although willing to report it, speak only in generalities. Human Rights Watch re ceived reports of rape in roughly half the villages it confirmed were burned. The real figure is certainly higher.
In the villages of Dingo and Koroma in Dar Masalit, for example, men said the Janjaweed "took girls into the grass and raped them there. Near Sissi, three women, aged thiry-two, twenty-two and twenty-five, were abducted at a water hole and taken to Nouri school, which was abandoned, and were raped. Rape continues to take place in and around the displaced settlements and towns under government control, even after civilians have fled their villages. In April, a displaced Fur woman collecting firewood outside Garsila town was attacked by Janjaweed who tried to rape her.
She was beaten so badly she later died. Janjaweed are now camped in some of the villages they have burned in Dar Masalit, guaranteeing that no Masalit civilians will return to the area.
From here, he said, "they are going into the mountains every day looking for the SLA. Human Rights Watch also saw Janjaweed camped in villages far from the SLA's bases in the mountains close to the border with Chad on the western edge of the Masalit area. From these villages, the Janjaweed mounted raids across the border into Chad and exerted some control over the movement of displaced persons.
Their mere presence close to the border ensured that refugees in Chad did not attempt to cross back into Darfur to salvage buried grain or other belongings. On March 25, Aisha, a year-old woman from Abun, left Chad in the night to attempt to bring food from her village. She and one other woman walked for two days.
They wore uniforms like the army. If they saw me, they would have killed me. Some Fur villages around Wadi Salih remain intact, but only because residents have paid large sums of "protection" money to Janjaweed who control their movements and circulation in the area.
Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that even severely ill or wounded villagers were forced to remain in their home villages and denied access to larger towns with hospitals and health care unless they had janjaweed escorts.
Displaced in government and Janjaweed-controlled towns continue to suffer systematic attacks. Even old women trying to collect firewood outside the towns risk beatings and rape if they leave the towns.
The insecurity coupled with the complete destruction of food stocks and other essentials such as water sources further guarantees that displaced Masalit will not return to their home villages. The repeated attacks by Janjaweed and government forces, burning of villages and destruction of livelihoods has left displaced Masalit and Fur destitute and dependent on relief aid. A recent UN humanitarian mission to Darfur found that people want to return home but are unwilling to do so until they are reassured that security has been restored.
In some Fur areas of West Darfur, civilians have paid sums of money to the Janjaweed in order to return to their villages, only to face further attacks once they returned. These examples clearly indicate the impossibility of return while the janjaweed remain encamped in and around the villages of the displaced. Recent U. Masalit persons in Geneina reported seeing women and children they said were the families of Janjaweed fighters moving south through Geneina, beginning at the end of March The movement coincided with a broadcast on state-run Geneina radio calling one of the most feared Janjaweed leaders, Hamid Dawai, "the emir of the emirate of Dar Masalit".
One Masalit chief reported that these woman and children were travelling with an army escort. A twenty-seven-year-old farmer called Feisal said he saw "Janjaweed families coming from the north with their tents and baggage" in the first week of April. Big cars, with thirty to forty in each car. I counted about thirteen families.
Dar Masalit is becoming an Arab area. They are going to bring their families. Do you think we do not know? It is their color, their language and their clothes. They are not as we are.
Although the movement of families appears to be small at this time, a number of displaced men have reported seeing Arab women and children in places where previously there were only armed men.
Hassan, a twenty-two-year-old farmer from Gokar, reported seeing "Arabs with their wives and children and many cows" in the villages of Tur, Urum and Tullus. Since the slave trade era, Arabs have violated and dominated Africans.
Yet the Organization of African Unity, the AU predecessor, ducked these inequities under the doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of sister states.
The AU has stayed that odious course. It's telling that the AU has not denounced Sudan for the Darfur atrocities. And, at its annual summit in Addis Ababa last week, the AU declared that the Darfur killings did not amount to genocide. Although the killings clearly meet that definition according to the Genocide Convention, unfortunately Powell also failed last week to declare that the Darfur killings meet the definition of genocide.
The AU offer to send just soldiers to Darfur to protect aid workers, monitors, and civilians from Arab militiamen - in an area the size of France - demonstrates lack of political will to confront Sudan. Important, too, is that Arab states should condemn Sudan; otherwise their anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rings hollow. How can they protest the killing of Palestinians when their kin exterminate Africans in Sudan?
The tragedy of Darfur wouldn't be permitted if it were taking place in Europe. But African states must take advantage of the interest by the UN and the US to bring about maximum diplomatic and economic pressure, including sanctions, to hasten regime change in Sudan. Khartoum must be put on notice that only an open and inclusive democracy will save it from partition into two states, one black African, the other Arab.
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Looting, burning food stocks, enslaving and raping women and children, and stealing livestock are common. Dead bodies are tossed in wells to contaminate water supplies and entire villages are burned to the ground.
Bush called for the number of international troops in Darfur to be doubled. In addition, the US has imposed economic sanctions on Sudan since However, after working and talking with the Sudanese government for years, the US formally revoked its sanctions on Sudan in On September 17, , British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote an open letter to the members of the European Union calling for a unified response to the crisis. Both China and Russia have blocked many United Nations resolutions on Darfur because of their support for the Sudanese government, a big trading partner.
China invests heavily in Sudanese oil. Russia and China opposed UN peace keeping troops in Sudan. Since the ousting of Omar al-Bashir in early , the Sudanese government has established and retained a transitional government.
Although this government recently did agree to turn to turn over al-Bashir to the ICC, its next steps and transition to a permanent government remain to be seen. Arbitrary detention, torture, limitations of the freedom of press, and gender-based violence continue to be seen in both Darfur and Sudan as a whole under this new government.
Sudan — Darfur. Pro-government militia in Darfur. SLM combatants. President Omar al-Bashir.
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