JOHN PRENDERGAST :Sudan's Ravines of Death

Sudan's Ravines of Death

July 15, 2004
By JOHN PRENDERGAST


IN NORTHERN DARFUR, Sudan

While Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary General
Kofi Annan of the United Nations, and several members of
Congress were in government-controlled areas of Darfur a
few weeks ago, I crossed into Darfur's rebel-held
territory. This is the part of Sudan that the regime
doesn't want anyone to see, for good reason.

I expected to see a depopulated wasteland rife with
deteriorating evidence of the ethnic cleansing campaign
pursued by the government of Sudan. The regime, in response
to a rebellion begun by primarily non-Arab groups in early
2003, armed the Janjaweed militia, giving them impunity to
attack.

I did indeed see numbing evidence of such a campaign in
this Muslim region of Sudan, which is populated by Arabs
and non-Arabs. Burned villages confirmed harrowing stories
we had heard from Darfurians who were lucky enough to make
it to refugee camps in Chad. About 1.5 million people have
been left homeless, and as many as 300,000 may be dead by
year's end. In village after village that I visited, the
painstakingly accumulated wealth of the non-Arab population
of Darfur - their livestock, their homes, their grainstocks
- had been destroyed in a matter of minutes.

I was not prepared for the far more sinister scene I
encountered in a ravine deep in the Darfur desert. Bodies
of young men were lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by
the 130-degree desert heat. The story the rebels told us
seemed plausible: the dead were civilians who had been
marched up a hill and executed by the Arab-led government
before its troops abandoned the area the previous month.
The rebels assert that there were many other such scenes.

The government's deadly portfolio in Darfur already
includes the wanton burning and bombing of villages, the
raping of women and girls, and the denial of humanitarian
aid, all of which have so far claimed tens of thousands of
lives. But judging from the scene in the ravine, executions
may also be part of the assault.

My colleague Samantha Power, the author of "A Problem from
Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," and I traveled
together through the refugee camps and the rebel-held
villages. Refugees in Chad claimed their loved ones had
been stuffed into wells by the Janjaweed to poison the
water supply. We went looking for these wells and found
them covered in sand, in what might be construed as an
effort by the Sudanese regime to cover its tracks.

While Western dignitaries visited the camps teeming with
refugees from Darfur and elsewhere, I encountered large
numbers of displaced civilians inside the rebel-held areas
of Darfur, where no camps exist and not a drop of
international assistance has been delivered. There are
potentially hundreds of thousands of survivors who have
fallen through the cracks. Some of them say they are afraid
to travel to government-controlled camps and unable to make
it to the border. They are running out of food.

It is urgent that the United Nations, donors and
nongovernmental organizations demand access to these
desolate areas, to deliver aid to the people left behind.

And it is not enough to collect testimonies only from
refugees in the government camps, as the State Department
is beginning to do. Investigators must cross into the
rebel-held zones of Darfur to exhume evidence and conduct
inquiries there as well.

Obviously, in such a dire situation security is paramount,
both for the delivery of humanitarian aid and for the
creation of conditions to allow Darfurians to return to
their homes. For all the visibility of Darfur lately, the
United Nations and others have accepted a Sudanese plan
under which the wolf will guard the henhouse. The
international community has called on the government to
disarm the same militias it helped create and arm, and to
use the government police to patrol the same camps the
regime has been terrorizing. A mere 300 African Union
troops spread over an area the size of France are meant to
ensure the government's change of heart.

This formula guarantees that six months from now the
Janjaweed will still be in a position to kill, rape and
pillage, leaving unchallenged the ethnic cleansing campaign
that has changed the map of Darfur.

In one interview after another, Sudanese refugees and those
displaced but still within Sudan's borders told us that
they would never trust the government to disarm the
Janjaweed, that only an international force could protect
them. Sufficient numbers of elite Rwandan and Nigerian
forces, now conceived of as the bulk of the African Union
contingent, could lead such an effort if they were properly
financed, equipped and otherwise supported by Europe and
the United States.

There has been a great deal of tough talk since the visits
of Mr. Powell, Mr. Annan and others, but the United Nations
Security Council so far has failed to act decisively. It is
time to move directly against regime officials who are
responsible for the killing. Accountability for crimes
against humanity is imperative, as is the deployment of
sufficient force to ensure disarmament and arrangements to
deliver emergency aid. The sands of the Sahara should not
be allowed to swallow the evidence of what will probably go
down as one of the greatest crimes in our lifetimes.

John Prendergast, who worked on African affairs for the
Clinton administration from 1996 to 2001, is an adviser to
the International Crisis Group, an independent
conflict-prevention group