العرب هم ايضاً ضحايا «ازمة دارفور

Quote: he Arabs Are Victims, Too By Julie Flint Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page B01 In the fourth year of the war in Sudan's Darfur region, tens of thousands of Arab nomads are barely clinging to life in the ravaged valley that extends north from the central Jebel Marra massif. Their settlements have been destroyed and their herds targeted. Their traditional migration routes have been cut. The villages, markets and clinics on which they depended lie abandoned and in ruins. Their children have one of the highest mortality rates in Darfur. Measles, whooping cough, hepatitis E, jaundice and the most virulent form of meningitis, W135 -- rural Darfur has them all. There are small, everyday tragedies, too, repeated in almost every community: In one impoverished nomad settlement, nine young people died in collapsing hand-dug wells over the course of only three weeks. Their deaths, like those of all other nomad children in this war, went unremarked. The Abbala, the camel nomads of North Darfur, have always been the most vulnerable, the most neglected, of the region's many communities. So it is no coincidence that the hard core of today's Janjaweed militias -- the Sudanese government's predominantly Arab proxies in the war against rebel troops -- come from their ranks. The abhorrent crimes of the Janjaweed -- rape, pillage, murder -- have made it easy to forget that Darfur's indigenous nomads are themselves victims, driven into the embrace of a government of serial war criminals by drought, desertification and brute poverty. The incurious reporting that has reduced the war to a simple morality tale, an African "Lord of the Rings," equates Janjaweed with Arab, and especially Abbala. But only a minority of Darfur's 300,000 or so Abbala have joined the 20,000 to 30,000 Janjaweed. Most have refused to contribute soldiers, well aware that good relations with their non-Arab neighbors are more important than an alliance with an uncaring government hundreds of miles away. Yet they have been collectively stigmatized for the crimes of the Janjaweed and their suffering has been ignored. Few journalists have written about them, or listened to them -- myself included. We know next to nothing about the situation of the nomads despite the gravity -- and the consistency -- of their claims: that since the war began, 40 percent of their herds have been lost and 20 percent of their people have died because of rebel ambushes, massacres and sickness. Most of what we do know comes from the people fighting them. Arabs constitute about a third of the population of Darfur. The Abbala, however, are a small minority in the areas in which they are present -- North and West Darfur. They have only two members in the 450-member National Assembly and have never formed a political force powerful enough to put their needs on anyone's agenda, even though the discrimination against them dates back more than a century. The British who ruled Darfur until independence in 1956 assigned almost all of the settled groups in the region a dar -- or tribal homeland -- of their own, but left the nomadic groups without. In peace, the camel herders enjoyed customary rights of passage and pasture in the dars of others. But this war has