Their Villages Plundered, Sudanese Struggle in Desert

GOUNGOUR, On the Chad-Sudan border —  Barefoot and half-naked, Hamesa Adam carried two sons on her back for six days across the searing Sudanese desert. Two other children, missing their dead father, walked barefoot, and two more rode a donkey.

But 6-year-old Mohammed, one of the children on the donkey, got weaker and weaker.

He cried constantly, clutching at his side. There was not enough food. On the fourth day, Mohammed struggled off the donkey and fell onto the sand.

They buried him nearby, about 2 feet down, placing branches on the grave to keep animals from digging up his body.

This is the story of the Adam family, Sudanese farmers chased from their homes by Arab militias on horses and camels who swept down on their village, Selti, about three months ago with a kind of ruthless, medieval wrath: killing, raping, looting, burning. Some attacked in Land Cruisers mounted with automatic weapons. From the air, two helicopters strafed the village.

About 100,000 farmers in the Darfur region of western Sudan have made the same epic journey as the Adam family these past weeks and months, fleeing west into Chad. Perhaps half are in refugee camps. Others live near the border in the desert, a sand-blown, pitiless furnace.

U.N. officials call it one of the world’s worst crises. A million Sudanese have been affected by fighting in Darfur since rebels took up arms last year seeking a share of power and the country’s oil revenue; 10,000 people have died. Pro-government Arab militias called janjaweed are fighting the rebels, but their attacks target mainly tribal African civilians.

Crisis Is Getting Worse

In Darfur, according to the aid group Doctors Without Borders, the crisis is “radically worsening,” with severe water and food shortages and child malnutrition rising sharply. The group reports that “assistance is utterly inadequate.” The big fear is that when the rains come in a few weeks, tens of thousands of Sudanese on the border will be cut off without food and with no hope of getting it.

Some refugees say that Khartoum government forces have taken part in the scorched-earth attacks, swooping down on villages with helicopters and Antonov planes. Human Rights Watch, based in New York, reported that government forces, allied with the Arab militias, carried out widespread ethnic killings and dispossession.

The Arab militias, mainly herdsmen, are terrorizing black African farmers from the Zaghawa, Fur and Massalit tribes and grabbing the spoils: land, stock, money and anything else they can steal. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum denies it controls the militias, but observers point out that it serves the government’s interests to repress areas where it is fighting rebels.

The Darfur rebellion sharpened in recent months as peace talks between the government and a separate army of southern Christian rebels to end 21 years of civil war seemed close to an end, with a deal to carve up power and Sudan’s oil wealth between them.

Gunfire Came at Dawn

The attack on the Adams’ village came with the gentle light of dawn three months ago. One of Hamesa’s brothers, Khalil, was eating breakfast when he heard gunfire. He looked outside.

Another brother, Saleman, ran out of his house. He was shot in the face by a janjaweed warrior on horseback.

Khalil told his wife to run and hide with the children in a nearby wadi, or dry riverbed. He crept to a friend’s house to hide.

Hamesa, 45, was making tea as her husband prayed. He was still in the sleeping area of their four-room thatched straw house when gunmen burst in, demanding money. They killed him, ordered Hamesa out and burned down the house around him.

“They burned my house, they grabbed my baby off my back and threw him in the fire. They took everything I owned and all my cows,” she said, rocking her youngest son, Khamiz, and flapping her scarf to remove the flies from the burn on his foot and leg. The flies rose half-heartedly and settled an instant later.

Many women were raped in the attack on Selti village. Perhaps Hamesa was one of them. But Sudanese women do not admit to such shame.

The gunmen stole her clothes, her children’s clothes and her cows and goats.

“They said, ‘You are abid, abid, abid. You cannot stay here,’ ” Hamesa said, using a derogatory word meaning “blacks.” “They said, ‘We’ll kill all the men in the village and we’ll leave the women in the village like slaves to help us do anything we want.’ ”

Three of her cousins, aged 12, 17 and 32, ran outside when they heard attack helicopters raking the ground with bullets. All three were killed. Hamesa’s younger sister, Hadiya, 23, lost her husband that day, mowed down by a machine gun.

Beaten, Raped, Killed

Khalil Adam said 15 people were killed; another villager put the dead at 32. The number cannot be verified. Two women were beaten to death with machine guns, and another barely survived a beating, Khalil said. He saw two girls aged 10 and 12 being raped, then branded like cattle on their hands, a mark that will stigmatize them for life.

“They destroyed all our village. They took all our goats and cows and sheep,” Khalil said. “The attack went on all day. I stayed in my friend’s house because we had to find our people, who was alive, who was dead.”

Sudanese from other villages tell similar stories. Tahir Yousef, 35, said his village, Filita, was attacked late last month. He said he counted 300 villagers killed in their houses, in the market and in the fields. The figure cannot be verified. Human Rights Watch reported the massacre of 136 non-Arab men in Darfur last month.

Every day, dispossessed Sudanese farmers walk out of the desert into Chad. There is little food and water for the journey and nothing for the donkeys.

One hundred people left Selti together after the attack. More than 10 died on the six-day journey.

Hamesa’s children cried as they made their way across the desert. The two who walked cried because the sand burned their feet; baby Khamiz cried because his festering burns were covered with flies; and Mohammed cried as he lay dying on the back of the donkey.

“I was barefoot and my children had no shoes either. None of my children had clothes because the military people stole them,” Hamesa said, referring to the Arab militias. “We came here naked. I only had my undervest.”

Only Energy to Survive

Hamesa’s face is ravaged by sun, hard work and grief, but her eyes are beautiful. Recounting her story in a blunt, factual way, she seems almost numb from her ordeal -- betraying no anger, shedding no tears. It is as if her journey and her grief vacuumed up everything but the energy needed to survive.

Hamesa’s younger sister, Hadiya, whose husband was killed, carried her only son, Ibrahim, 3, on her back during the desert journey. On the third day, the boy died of thirst. Khalil hacked a branch from a tree to make a rough spade to dig the grave, which they covered with branches and marked with two rocks. Hysterical, Hadiya threw herself to the ground and dashed her face against some rocks, bleeding into the sand.

The next day, burying Mohammed, there was no time to mourn. An Antonov plane flew toward them, and the family had to flee.

“When my son died, I cried very much, and I felt very sad that I couldn’t do anything to help him,” Hamesa said. “I was crying as we buried him. All my tears were falling from my eyes, and we had to run away and hide in a dry creek bed.”

The refugees of Sudan have been welcomed in Chad, where tribal ties go back centuries. But in the Chadian village of Barata, a few hundred yards from the Sudan border, the conflict regularly spills over the frontier. The wadi where refugees get water, just over the border in Sudan, is attacked daily by the janjaweed fighters.

Last month, a Barata villager was killed while getting water. A Sudanese woman from a nearby refugee settlement was recently beaten and raped at the wadi. The villagers, who do not dare risk sending the breadwinner of the family on the dangerous trip for water, have been forced to make a terrible choice: They send their children instead.

“The children are afraid, and sometimes they come back” before getting the water, said the head of the village, Arbab Yahiyar. “We are afraid that maybe they will be shot or beaten. But we have to send them. We depend on our children every day.”

And when the janjaweed come rampaging across the border several times a week to attack refugee settlements and loot stock, sometimes shooting people, they attack Barata and other Chadian villages too, despite a cease-fire reached last month between rebels and the Sudanese government.

Hamesa and her brother, Khalil, stayed about 10 weeks here in Goungour without enough food. Then, in desperation, they trekked to the Farchana refugee camp, 60 miles away, where the World Food Program distributes food to registered refugees.

They took their children and Khalil’s wife but had to leave behind the rest of the family -- two new widows and their children -- because they could not walk the distance.

The camp is full. Women seek shelter from the sun under stunted, leafless sticks of trees and line up for seven hours for water. For unregistered newcomers such as Hamesa, there are no food rations, no medical screening -- not even a tent. They crowd under a shelter, save a place in the long water queue by leaving their containers in line and beg for a little food from refugees lucky enough to be registered with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Hoping for Some Help

Telling her story, Hamesa sat with Khamiz at her breast, the burns on his legs oozing and covered with flies. She jiggled the restless boy until he slept. She wore a bright blue cotton shawl that another refugee had given her in Goungour after she arrived wearing only an undershirt. She did not even know that there were doctors at the camp to see to Khamiz’s wounds. She brightened when she heard there was a chance that someone would look at her son’s burns.

A new camp is being built to take the overflow from Farchana. Hamesa, Khalil and the children have to wait until it is finished to move there and get food rations. That is weeks away.

Simon Salamini, head of the World Food Program’s office in the eastern Chadian city of Abeche, has the job of getting 7,000 tons of food from port to the eastern border area before the rains come in late May or June.

If the food doesn’t get there in time, there won’t be any for the camps.

When the rains arrive, what will happen to the tens of thousands who may still be stranded at the border without enough food?

“That is a question I cannot answer,” Salamini said.

With the Adam family, the janjaweed warriors achieved their goal of permanent dispossession. The family will not go back.

The thought of returning brought a smile to Hamesa’s lips. But it was a smile traced with despair.

“My family, my husband died there. What am I going to do there?” she asked. “I am staying here as a refugee. I have no hope now.”