"This is not a girl, she is not dying," I think. "This is not her spastic body, not her trembling hands. These are not her legs, devoid of flesh, not her fly-infested face, not her expressionless eyes, not her twisted fingers. This is not a girl," the mind insists. "She is not five years old. That can't be."
We are sitting in a tent in the Djabal refugee camp in Chad, two kilometers west of Goz Beida. A few minutes earlier, we had been told that there was a girl in serious condition in one of the corners of the camp, and now she is sitting across from us on a colorful mat, next to her mother and her two brothers. I [Assaf Uni] find myself incapable of looking at her for more than a second or so, from time to time.
This denial reflex will return to me often: a kind of defense mechanism of the mind. This is not really a girl who is dragged, crying, by soldiers into a clump of bushes to be raped; this is not a man who is savagely mauled by a rope whip; these are not the final hours of the mute children in the hospital, their bellies distended from hunger, their eyes in a wide vacant stare. Soon enough, though, the mind refocuses and starts to take in the information: This is real life in eastern Chad, the life of Sudanese refugees and Chadian displaced persons. This is life and this is suffering on the fringes of the slaughter in Darfur.
The small United Nations plane lifts off from N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, eastward, straight into the huge African sun, which at this hour of the morning is already beginning to scald the barren plains. The single-engine aircraft gains elevation, leaving behind the dust-clogged air, the brown earth and the brutal heat that glued us to the gray plastic seats with dirty perspiration. April in Chad, 45 degrees Celsius in the shade; only at 12,500 feet can you breathe.
"Welcome to the flight of the World Food Program from N'Djamena to Abeche," the pilot shouts over his shoulder in a South African accent to the small passenger cabin, which is populated by a handful of aid workers, photographer Uriel Sinai, and me. "Flight time: an hour and a half."
Below us unfolds the Sahel, the desert south of the Sahara, which stretches in a belt from the Atlantic coast of Mauritania in the west to the Nile River in the east. Only isolated trees grow here in the dry season. The arid wadis cross the desert in dark, winding lines. In the period of Africa's exploitation by European countries, the Sahel played a key role. France tried to seize control of it by creating a series of colonies from western Africa to the eastern region, in order to control the ancient trade routes that lie between the two ends of the continent. Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Chad - all were French colonies.
In Sudan, the ambitions of the French collided with those of the British, who tried to establish a rival axis from north to south, from Cairo to Cape Town. The impact of that struggle, and of the artificial borders forged by the Great Powers on the soil of Africa in the Berlin Conference of 1885, are still visible.
The small Beechcraft banked sharply to the right and began its descent ahead of landing in Abeche, the largest city in eastern Chad. Through the plane window the city looks like a huge crossword puzzle: squares upon squares of one-story houses, surrounded by fenced-off yards in which a lone tree casts some shade. Occasionally an imposing mosque breaks the continuity of the houses.
Wild West
In 2001, I was told by an Italian aid worker, there were only two cars in Abeche. Today there are hundreds. The city owes this accelerated development to the confrontation in Darfur. The dozens of international aid organizations that have been operating in eastern Chad in recent years have made Abeche their base. From here, the army sets off to do battle with the rebels hiding in Darfur, less than 200 kilometers away.
Adam, a Chadian in his twenties and the driver for HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish-American association that views the provision of aid to Sudanese refugees in Chad as a moral imperative to the Jewish people), received us at the airport with a smile and a hearty handshake. "Ca va?" he asked; "Oui, ca va," we replied. French is the lingua franca here among the international aid personnel and the locals [whom] they employ. At home they speak Arabic. "Wait here until they bring your knapsacks," he said, pointing to a shaded corner.
In the meantime, we checked out the small airport: an African hybrid, combining a humanitarian aid center and a military base. Three French MiGs, painted a threatening black, are on the tarmac; alongside them is a well-armed, battle-ready Chadian helicopter. In recent weeks, the fighting between Chad and the Sudanese army has resumed, and dozens of soldiers have been killed in the border region.
Ammunition crates in dark olive-green were scattered around on the asphalt. Every so often a noisy military truck or a jeep packed with Chadian soldiers arrived in order to load or unload equipment. In Africa, France is still a Great Power. France utilizes its satellites to warn the current president about rebel convoys that are making their way toward the capital - when this promotes its interests in the region. But if such action is contrary to its interests, France will support the very same rebels to depose the president and install a new one in his place. The French maintain a base at Abeche - on the tarmac were a few small, light-colored French army jeeps, carrying troops in starched uniforms.
A powerful noise of engines suddenly fills the airport. The chief of the local police, the commissar, rushed out of his office and with his hands smoothed the short-sleeved black suit he was wearing. He ran onto the asphalt to receive those alighting from an immense U.S. Navy jet that had just landed on the short runway. The plane was carrying Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who had been sent to the region to persuade Sudan's government to accept a multinational force in Darfur. He has come to Abeche to visit one of the refugee camps of the Darfur survivors, to see for himself the deteriorating humanitarian situation. Our knapsacks arrive on a large wooden cart; Adam insists on lugging them for us.
There is a Wild West atmosphere in Abeche. Everyone who belongs to an organization or an army is armed and speeding through the city in SUVs. An air-conditioned HIAS Land Cruiser drove us along the sandy streets. Muslim preachers delivered afternoon sermons in the local market - a collection of shade-giving lean-tos where you can buy anything from ammunition and yellow jerrycans to clothes. Barefoot children held out stainless-steel bowls for food handouts. Every moving vehicle left clouds of dust in its wake. Improvised wooden booths sold colored fuel in bottles: one liter in Bacardi bottles, two liters in plastic jugs. Huge trucks that arrived from the desert, with dozens of people guarding the cargo, moved ponderously on the roads.
"Here, those are Tora Boro," Adam said, pointing to an open Jeep in the back of which a few armed men stood, wrapped in galabiyas and turbans. They are the African rebels who started the confrontation in Darfur. They have a safe haven in Chad and from here set out across the border. They have been joined by many Chadians, who constitute something like low-paid government-backed armed militias, and they top up their official income by robbing aid organizations and civilians.
Dozens of local people milled around the well-guarded compound of the UN refugee agency - a government within a government, which manages the aid operation in eastern Chad - checking the organization's job notices. The UN and the array of aid groups that are deployed in guarded compounds across Abeche are an important economic engine for the city. They employ hundreds of residents as guards, cleaners and drivers as well as logistics, support and infrastructure personnel. To work for the organizations is the heart's desire of the people of Abeche.
We were told by aid workers that the Chadian authorities are forcing the organizations to employ relatives of the local leaders. In the compound cafeteria, an island of coolness, sparkling Coke and satellite TV that was reporting raucously on the presidential race in France, we met an American diplomat who is posted in N'Djamena. She arrived here to accompany Negroponte, but there was no room for her in the small plane that took him south. She has been in Chad for three years and was counting the days until she is transferred to Yemen. "Thirty-one days," she said with a smile. "I had only one request for the transfer: I wanted a place with paved roads."
According to the diplomat, Chad's Defense Minister, Mahamat Nour, is also in Abeche and is conducting the fighting against the rebels. His story is interesting: last April, Nour was a rebel himself and led thousands of his men in a secret convoy from the border with Sudan to the capital, a trek of 1,000 kilometers, in an attempt to overthrow Chad's long-serving (17 years) president, Idriss Deby. On the morning of April 14, they stormed the capital, taking Deby's forces completely by surprise. However, they were unable to find the presidential palace and had to ask passersby where the president lived.
The locals told them to look for a large Colonial mansion across from a tall building. The rebels mistakenly attacked a branch of the Libyan Bank. In the wake of their failure, the army managed to regroup and block them. Nearly 600 people were killed in half a day of hostilities. Most of the rebels were taken captive. Afterward, Deby declared a peace agreement with the rebel movement, the F.U.C., and appointed Mahamat Nour defense minister. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," the diplomat says, still smiling.
For a token payment, the UN arranged for us to stay at Villa Sudan, an isolated building on Idriss Deby Boulevard. It is protected by a large metal gate and, during the day, by a guard equipped with a truncheon and a walkie-talkie. At night there are two guards. All the guards in Chad wear black, a sign that they sit in the shade most of the day. From here we organized a trip to the south. We hired a vehicle and a driver, stocked up on food and water, arranged to meet with representatives of the aid organizations, and tried to find an efficient interpreter. The candidate we finally chose was named Havard Hassan, from the Masalit tribe. He said he was born in Sudan, went to school in Libya, and moved to Abeche eight years ago. "The Jeep leaves here in two days and meets us in Goz Beida," we told him. "Can you join it?" "No problem," he said with a broad smile, his head nodding from side to side. "You can trust me 100 percent." We traveled to Goz Beida.
Separation and enmity
The conflict in western Sudan, in the region known as Darfur ("land of the Fur tribe") simmered for many years below the surface, until it erupted in a peak of violence in 2003. Like other conflicts in Africa, it stemmed from a combination of intertribal tensions, a corrupt government that looked after the interests of the small group [that] it represented, and a war over natural resources. Unlike most of the conflicts, it deteriorated rapidly into what the United States administration and international organizations described as "genocide" against the African inhabitants.
The confrontation began with a series of murderous attacks by members of the African tribes of western Sudan on bases of the Sudanese government, which they accused of neglecting the region. In large measure, this was a replay of the confrontation that had flared up between the Christian south and the Muslim north of Sudan, Africa's largest country. It generated one of the most-lethal civil wars in the history of the continent, with three million victims. There was one difference from the war in the Christian south: Almost all the residents of Darfur are Muslims. In practice, that made absolutely no difference.
The Arab government of Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir, was unable to cope with the rebel assaults and chose the same method [that] it had employed against the Christian south - the use of Arab militias. Although they share a living space, language and religion, a longstanding conflict has existed between the Arab minority of Darfur - tribes that were originally Bedouin, some of which are nomads and others tillers of the soil - and the African majority. For hundreds of years, a separation between the groups was maintained, along with the enmity. Throughout this period, Arab merchants carried out raids against the African population, taking tens of thousands of black Africans prisoner and leading them into the desert to the slave markets of North Africa.
The Arabs wandered from place to place, loyal to their tribes and refusing to accept the authority of the local rulers. Accordingly, the land belonged to the African inhabitants through a ramified system of authorizations called "hakura." Following a series of severe droughts at the beginning of the 1990s, the hostility between the sides erupted into a war for natural resources. The spread of the Sahara southward sparked battles for grazing land and water wells. The Arabs, who in the dry years wandered with their camels and their flocks into the areas of the African tribes in order to graze their animals and sell goods, were no longer welcome. In 2000 they began arming themselves and seizing control of agricultural lands in the possession of the Africans.
In 2003, the Khartoum government exploited the ethnic conflict in Darfur for its own purpose - to suppress the African rebels who were attacking government forces and installations on the grounds that the government was discriminating against them in favor of the Arab inhabitants. The Sudanese intelligence service, which was assigned to put down the uprising in Darfur, recruited some of the leaders of the Arab tribes and supplied them with ammunition, vehicles, fuel and communications means. Thus were the Janjaweed militias born (a name [that] the Africans gave to the Arabs who attacked them, meaning "devil on horseback"). The Arab leaders made no secret of the fact that their intention was to "cleanse" Darfur of Africans. With the direct encouragement of the government of Sudan, the murderous attacks began.
In 2003-04, nearly 200,000 people were murdered - most of them Africans from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes - by the Janjaweed militias and Sudanese government forces in Darfur. More than 2.5 million people abandoned their villages and concentrated in large numbers close to cities or army bases. Hundreds of thousands fled west into Chad, where they hoped that the army, which takes its orders from Deby, who belongs to the Zaghawa, would stop the Janjaweed convoys.
The international aid organizations were quick to act. Their personnel combed eastern Chad in search of places to erect refugee camps, and eventually marked 12 places along the border with Sudan. The refugees were trucked to the camps and started to build straw huts in place of those that were burned in Darfur, and generally tried to rehabilitate their lives.
It was on the fringes of one such camp, in Djabal, that we came across a 5-year-old girl, Jamiya Simar Pap, in a wretched tent that provided only very partial protection from the sun. She has no more than a few months to live. According to local aid personnel, she is severely malnourished. Her mother does not understand what is wrong and seems to have given up on her. At first, she says, she took the girl to hospitals in Sudan, where they had lived before fleeing. But the wandering and the poverty have sealed Jama's fate. No one took responsibilty for caring for her, and now it is too late.
"What can be done to save her?" I asked one of our escorts, a local aid worker. "Not much," he replies. "We will recommend to the mother that she take her to the hospital, but I doubt that they will be able to help her there." Jama, it turns out, was in a hospital three months ago, but was discharged without being given any treatment. No one was able to explain why.
Around us the camp stretched on a sandy hill, amid towering, jagged red cliffs. This is the boundary between the desert and the more-fertile regions to the south. Some 20,000 Darfur refugees live here. Thousands of straw huts, their walls made of reeds bound with brown tree-bark and their pointed roofs consisting of layers of thick straw, are organized in well-ordered compounds. We drove on the sand trails that crisscross the camp. Clay shards mark the paths along which SUVs can travel. A few water towers are scattered in the camp. Along with the schools, the hospital and a few stone structures, they illustrate the absolute dependence of the refugees on the aid organizations.
But despite the aid, infants are dying here of hunger and disease. In the evening, in the guarded compound of one of the Italian aid groups, Antonio (not his real name) tried to explain why. "Although the international organizations and the UN do not admit it, aid to the Darfur refugees has been significantly reduced in the past year. The refugees have less food, their water ration has been cut from 15 liters per person per day to just five, and the medical aid has worsened," he said.
Dark had already fallen, and Federico shut down the generator for the night. Instantly, the sky was strewn with a million stars. The quiet was broken only by the Chadian donkeys, which began to converse between the compounds with loud braying. "The reasons for the worsening," he continued, "are a decline in funding and an increase in the number of Chadian internally displaced persons, who compete with the refugees for international aid."
Like most of the aid personnel, Federico was cynical. "I have been here two years already, and I have not been able to cause any change, any improvement in the refugees' lives. On the contrary, I see how the suffering is continuing to spread and more and more people are dying." He had two weeks left in Chad before returning to Italy. Someone told us that in the past he worked on oil rigs. "He is trying to atone for his past through the work here," she said.
A few days later, he was given a farewell party by the few Westerners stationed in Goz Beida. At dusk, the local workers spread colorful mats on the ground. The Italians asked to use our water coolers for their beer. Evening fell, the sun lit the dust particles in the air in red, Chadian music blared out of punctured loudspeakers. Federico walked around in a green galabiya, content. Suddenly a hail of stones struck the celebrants. A few local youngsters had climbed the fences and were hurling large stones with great ferocity. One of the drivers was hit in the mouth and the blood dripped onto the sand. Federico ushered everyone inside and the music stopped. Stones continued to land outside. "That's Chad," he said. "We are not entirely welcome here."
The driver, the interpreter, the photographer and I sat in the vehicle. The atmosphere was tense. Minutes before leaving Goz Beida, we decided to stop at the market to buy enough diesel fuel for a few days. Several of the locals milled around our white Jeep, and some asked where we were headed. A young Chadian walked quickly past the vehicle and shouted "Israeli!" The rumor about two Israeli journalists wandering around eastern Chad had apparently spread in Goz Beida.
The Jeep roared away, leaving in its wake a vast plume of dust and sand. In all of Chad, a country twice the size of France, there are 200 kilometers of paved roads. All are in the west of the country, far from where we were. Travel in these expanses is measured not in kilometers but in hours. We had more than an hour of driving left, and the vehicle shook with every pothole and listed badly whenever we tried to avoid sinking into the sand. Nearly all the windshields in Chad are cracked. The drivers don't bother to get them fixed on the unpaved roads. Flying stones are a commonplace phenomenon. The cracks are patched up with stickers.
The air outside was dry and burning hot, but we had to open the windows [in order] to air out the inside of the vehicle. With the wind came the dust, which enters every pore of the skin, is sucked into the nose and penetrates the ears. Sinai was chain-smoking. His stock of Marlboro Lites had been rapidly depleted. The local cigarettes are awful - they actually hurt the gums.
We were on the way to Goz Amir, another refugee camp, closer to the Sudan border. The desert landscape gave way to a vista of thick bushes and low trees. Baboons strode the earth, small monkeys jumped from tree to tree. The forest is full of trees with red trunks, and a few camels licked the leaves energetically. Every so often, we passed a herd of lean cows with sharp horns, the stock of the African Dajos, who live here. We also passed convoys of Chadian internal refugees on donkeys, making their way to Goz Amer.
We stopped to speak to one of the men, who was wearing a white skullcap and riding a small donkey. He told us [that] he had fled from his village with his family five days earlier, in fear of the Janjaweed. "We hope to reach Goz Amir by evening," he said. "And what awaits you there?" He had no idea.
"Please write that we need help," he said. A few children pranced around us and climbed the trees in an attempt to set a trap for one of the monkeys, which did not look particularly perturbed. They chased it from treetop to treetop, hoping [that] it would fall to the ground. "What will you do with it if you catch it?" we asked. "We just want to play with it," they replied.
This is the new arena of the conflict, which has spilled over from Darfur. Since the end of the rainy season last November, the area has become a battleground. More than 50 African villages have been abandoned in the wake of Janjaweed attacks and tens of thousands of people have massed around Goz Amir. The situation in the camp is desperate: there is no drinking water and no food, and no shade. Some of the refugees have created tents out of branches and thin cloth.
Humanitarian aid is almost nonexistent, apart from food distribution once every 45 days. That is not enough. The internal refugees continue to stream in every day. Before we arrived, UN sources said [that] there were 20,000 people in the camp. A count made while we were there put the number at 30,000.
Ahmadnil, a local worker for an international aid organization, took us on a tour of the camp. He is from the Zaghawa, the president's tribe, which gives him a considerable advantage in dealing with local bodies. We passed two military trucks. Sinai asked Ahmadnil if he could photograph them. "No problem," he replied with a smile. It turned out that he went to school with the commander of the force, Colonel Daud. The confirmation is given. The 300 or so soldiers in the trucks presented arms for the photo. They had returned from the Sudanese front, where they fought rebels against the Chad government and Sudanese forces. We had our picture taken with the commander and his staff. One was holding an Israeli-made Galilon rifle.
Everyone in eastern Chad is now arming. The Chadian government is sending truckloads of weapons to the African Dajos, so that they will fight the Arabs. Some aid personnel told me that they are concerned that the Chad government is trying to exploit the intertribal conflict for its own ends and "cleanse" the area of any Arab presence. The goal, they say, is to settle the growing Zaghawa tribe here. On the other side of the border, the Sudanese Janjaweed are arming their tribe to fight the Dajos and the government.
On my flight back to Paris, two-thirds of the plane was taken up by business class, justly dubbed "petroleum class." These are oil times in Chad. Five years ago, the World Bank began financing an oil pipeline from the south to the coast of Cameroon. Deby promised that in return for funding the pipeline, 80 percent of the oil revenues would be channeled into health and education. However, as soon as the oil started to flow, Deby reneged; he is using the money to procure arms. In response, the World Bank froze financial aid to Chad.
Sitting in petroleum class were Western businessmen and corrupt government officials and their families. Chad, along with Bangladesh, is the most-corrupt country in the world, according to the latest index published by Transparency International.
In Paris, I wandered among cafes where Parisians sipped strong coffee before going to work. The abundance disoriented me, the beauty of things caught me off guard. One's thoughts become simple, almost naive. Curly handwriting on a blackboard, announcing a restaurant's daily specials, was juxtaposed in my mind with the numbers drawn in sand to teach Sudanese children arithmetic - they have no blackboards, no paper. Why is it that in a world where Parisians can eat breakfast on a pleasant spring day, Jamiya Simar Pap must lie dying under the roiling sun?
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