LE MONDE 19.01.04 (published on 20.01.04)KHARTOUM CRUSHES THE REBELLION IN DARFUR WITH BLOOD AND FIREA drama is unfolding out of sight in Sudan’s western province. Almost a million people are wandering among villages that have been attacked, looted, burned and sometimes wiped off the map. The rebels say more than 2,300 villages have been devastated by “Arab” militias armed by the central government.Tulus, Achamara, Tur (Darfur)By our special correspondent They had been walking under the stars for six hours, alternating marching with running and never stopping. Their tired little horses snorted in the darkness, whipped along by their riders. The 15 or so rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA) had been in the saddle since the previous evening, having spent the day hiding up in a wadi, a sandy river bed. Bringing ammunition from somewhere along the border with Chad, they are joining up with one of the core groups of the movement in Darfur, in the west of Sudan.In the daytime, government forces and their allies, the janjawid (horseback) militias recruited from among Sudan’s “Arab” inhabitants comb the bush. The regular army, which has been unable to crush the rebellion, arms them. In exchange for their support in fighting, the militias (are permitted to) sack the area. Scorched earth is a tried and tested tactic in Sudan, perfected over two decades of another war, in the south, that the world hopes will soon be ended by a peace agreement.As the day belongs to the janjawid, so night in the scrubby savanna belongs to the rebels. But even then they have to take care to steer clear of the militiamen. Tonight, luck seeks to be against them. A 100 meters way from the rebel group, indistinct forms loom out of the half-light: men on horseback, barely discernible. The strangers are told to identify themselves. Their response is the sound of weapons being charged. Kalashnikovs spurt on the rebel side and hands reach for grenades. The silent shadows seem to deploy in the thorny bushes, then wheel sharply round and make off at a gallop, perhaps judging their adversaries too numerous to take on.FIERCE FIGHTINGWho were they? Impossible to know. The SPM/A group immediately changes its route, fearing an ambush further down the path. The fighting in Darfur is fierce. No-one is taking prisoners.Day dawning over this region without roads, schools or hospitals reveals a landscape of complete desolation. Since the spring of 2003, the militias, supported by the army and its cannon, have been sowing terror out of sight. In the capital, Khartoum, as in neighbouring countries, humanitarian organisations and the United Nations have been waiting in vain, for months now, for the promised authorisation to go to Darfur. In Chad, they are seeing a ceaseless flood of refugees arrive, spread along more than 500 kilometers of border and numbering more than 100,000. In Darfur itself, more than 700,000 people – a million, according to the highest estimates – wander among villages that have been attacked, looted and sometimes destroyed, far from the eyes of the world.They take flight at the slightest sound of boots and the name of janjawid, who also call themselves peshmerga, is constantly on their lips. A journey of 150 kilometers into the interior of Darfur explains this obsession this better than any words. Tulus, a large settlement (original: gros bourg), is one of so many martyred villages, famous for its weekly market, the wealth of is traders and its oil presses. An attack by the janjawid on 16 October swept away this quiet prosperity.“They arrived at dawn, from three sides of the village at once, and began shooting. Some came on foot, silently, followed by others on camel-back. Hundreds of men, all in uniform. They fired on everything,” remembers Mariam Abdallah Mohammed, who lost her husband in the attack.Villagers say that almost 200 people died that day. They are buried in large mass graves, covered with spiny branches to keep carrion away. (The next sentences beats me, word for word, but says in essence
Some bear the marks of whipping.Lists are everywhere, giving the numbers of victims, the date of attacks and, in meticulous detail, the number of cows stolen by the militiamen. The rebels have counted more than 2,300 villages attacked across Darfur. They all look alike: families sheltering under trees, sleeping in the dust in the glacial cold and under the bitter wind of the dry season. Circles of ash and blackened stones in which you can see bits of iron beds twisted by fire are all that remain of small huts of mud and straw. On the walls of homes with broken doors, tongues of soot bear witness to the fires they have seen.“BLACKS AGAINST REDS” Inside one of these dwellings, in Tulus, Al-Tayeb Suleiman crumbles a sooty wedge – the last remnants of a millet harvest that has been reduced to ashes. “For the past two or three months, they have been systematically burning everything they cannot carry away. They want to starve the people to chase them away from Darfur and to seize their land to give to their Arab brothers!”In this prosperous agricultural region, the farmers who define themselves as “negro-Africans,” with black skins, and tribes of Arab origin, “with red skins”, have co-existed for centuries. The former are, for the most part, farmers; the latter herders - a source of inevitable conflict that local customs once managed to resolve. But this is no more than a memory, carried away by the flare of civil war. “Blacks against Reds; now there’s hate,” whispers one villager. A woman standing beside him counts the relatives who have been killed in the attacks: more than 17.“They even kill the marabouts and burn the mosques!” The head of the group adds: “Many women have been raped. One of them, when we found her, was unable to walk. And so our sons join the rebellion, up there on the mountain (lit: rocks).”Up there, to the south, is the Jebel Marra, a massive mountain escarpment. The head of the rebellion has set up a new headquarters on the summit, defended from below by the huge, marshy bed of a wadi, then by a narrow pass and finally a dazzling escarpment. In his hideout overlooking the plain, the head of the SLA, Abdelwahid Mohamed Ahmed Al-Nour, sits on a mat, a battery of satellite telephones on front of him, communicating with his sector commanders. Everywhere there are new attacks, new villages burned. For him, there was no alternative to rebellion.“Darfur has been marginalised since independence, because the Arabs who came to power in Khartoum wanted to keep us in primitive conditions. Now we are fighting for our rights. We want schools, hospitals and our share of the national wealth. The Arab tribes are united against us. Some come from other countries in the region, from Central African, Cameroon and Niger. They have been promised our land, but our farmers want to fight now. I don’t have enough weapons for all the recruits.”When the SLM/A first appeared in February 2003, conflict had been simmering for years in Darfur, where a number of armed groups had tried to organise farmers into self-defense groups to protect their herds against raids by nomads, Arabs or “negro-Africans”. These little groups were crushed by the Sudanese army, their members killed, imprisoned or forced into exile. As a result, no-one took the SLM/A seriously – especially not the government, which called it a “bunch of bandits” and promised to “crush it”. But how could the regular army – poorly paid, badly motivated and containing many Sudanese of Darfurian origin – fight efficiently against a tough, tenacious rebel movement able to cover the entire region on horse-back, camel-back or, when the ground permits, Toyota pick-ups? The “non-Arab” tribes, as they call themselves, the Massalit, Fur and Zaghawa buried their differences and forged a sacred union.Throughout 2003 the SLA notched up victories, attacking the biggest towns in Darfur, destroying fighter planes at the military base in al Fasher, the old capital of Darfur, and harrassing the army. After this, the government decided to arm groups of Arab nomads and to unleash them across the region. Since then, it has been continual escalation. Jean-Philippe Rémy A young movement born in February 2003The Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) appeared in February 2003 in Darfur in the west of Sudan. The group, which was initially called the Darfur Liberation Army, launched its first attacks from Jebel Marra, a mountain massif in the centre of the region. This is the home of the Fur, one of the largest ethnic groups in Darfur – which means, in Arabic, the “house of the Fur.”Since then the movement has split into several wings. In the north, the SLM/A recruits especially among the Zaghawa, an ethnic group which spans the Sudan-Chad border and to which Chad’s president, Idriss Déby, belongs. In the south, the rebels recruit essentially among the Massalit and the Fur, whose independent sultanates flourished in this part of Africa from the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th, when they were incorporated into British Sudan.Unlike the war in southern Sudan, begun in 1983 and with hopes of ending in a peace agreement in the near future, the conflict has no religious dimension: in Darfur, a majority of the population is Moslem
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