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 Arab Nomads, 'Not Pro-Anything,' Also Suffer in Darfur
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...eferrer=emailarticle
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 7, 2007; Page A08
ZALINGEI, Sudan -- The dispute was of the sort handled a thousand times in this desert region of western Sudan: A young man from the semi-nomadic, cow-herding Arab Hotia tribe had assaulted a young woman from the nomadic, camel-herding Arab Abala tribe, and justice was due.
Following their centuries-old tradition of settling problems, the sheiks and elders from both tribes met and agreed on an amount the Hotia would pay to compensate the Abala, according to Hotia villagers
"We just had a small issue with them," the Hotia sheik, Mohameden Adam Abdullah, recalled about the incident two years ago.
What came next, however, offers an example of how four years of conflict have wiped out the delicate ordering of society in Darfur, not only between black African farmers and Arab nomads, but also, on a smaller scale, among Arab tribes often assumed to be the perpetrators of the violence.
Some of the Abala had been armed by the government and transformed into militiamen known as Janjaweed. The Hotia paid half the compensation money, but before they could gather the rest, the Abala attacked in a fury with trucks, camels, rifles and guns, Abdullah said.
"The government helped them . . . they were shooting arms from the government," he said. "First they attacked, and we defended ourselves. We killed some of them, and they had ID cards from the government."
The vast majority of the estimated 450,000 people killed and the 2.5 million displaced in Darfur since 2003 have been black African farmers targeted in a brutal government-led campaign to crush a rebellion. But the conflict has also affected nomadic Arabs, who until recently were largely overlooked by the largest relief effort in the world.
The fighting has cut off traditional nomadic migration routes, spawning intertribal conflicts. It has disrupted the once-lucrative camel trade among Sudan, Chad, Libya and Egypt, bringing down the average price of a camel to less than half of what it was a year ago.
In other cases, as with the Hotia and Abala, tribal disputes have escalated as the government has armed one side in its separate campaign against the Darfur rebels.
"It's way too easy to paint this conflict as one in which African tribes are the victims and Arabs are the aggressors," a U.N. official in the region said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "There are Arabs who are suffering. Several Arab tribes are not pro-government and not pro-anything. They are just as marginalized."
Although nomads in Darfur tend to identify themselves as Arabs and farmers tend to consider themselves Africans, the two groups have intermarried for centuries and are often physically indistinguishable.
Still, it is estimated that about half of Darfur's residents are Arab nomads who crisscross the region following the faint-green sprays of seasonal grasses that appear like miracles in the sometimes rolling, sometimes rocky desert.
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محمد الامين محمد
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست