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August 3, 2004 HOW THE JANJAWEED STOLE ONE FAMILY'S FUTURE Gethin Chamberlain Diplomatic Correspondent, In El Fashir, Darfur FOR two days, Bashir Marsal and Umal El Harif searched the hillside for each other and for their children. The sudden appearance of the Janjaweed and the sound of bombs falling on the village of Tawila had scattered them in all directions. They wandered from place to place on the sides of Djabal Atayab, asking anyone they met for help in finding the others. They had been together for more than 21 years. Bashir was a rich man in the village with herds of camels and goats, Umal the wife who looked after their house and brought up their seven children. They met in Abu Zeriga in 1983. Bashir says he was captivated by Umal's beauty. She smiles, and looks bashful. Their youngest, just a baby, suckles at her left breast as she sits by Bashir's side. Theirs is a story of a family whose lives were torn asunder by the Sudanese government's decision to send the nomadic Arab Janjaweed militia to drive the black African farmers of Darfur from their homes, and into the refugee camps now scattered across this vast region. It was towards the end of February that it happened. Bashir cannot recall the date but he remembers it was a little after 9am when he heard a plane far overhead. It was white, he says, an Antonov. It was too far away to identify with the naked eye, but he is certain on this point. It was an Antonov, he said, because it was dropping bombs. The explosions were loud and devastating. One bomb hit the village, shrapnel scything across the ground. It cut everything at the level of the ground, Umal says. The shards were like blades. There was black smoke and some flames, Bashir remembers. As many as 20 houses were destroyed, they agree, but they did not stop to count because then the Janjaweed appeared, riding into the village on their camels and horses. Bashir says that there were some men in a vehicle who were shooting at them and a helicopter gunship too, which raked the ground around the fleeing villagers. Some people were killed, but no-one is sure how many. No-one stopped to count, they say. There was no time to think about anybody else - they just ran until they reached the hillside and there they took shelter and watched what was left of their homes burning, as the Janjaweed rode away with their animals and their livelihood. Everyone went their own way, Bashir says. Everybody had to protect themselves. "We were looking for each other all over the mountain. I was worried about finding my family. I was thinking that I would not find them, that they would have been killed. For two days I was searching among the people on the mountains," he says. Eventually, after two days, he found them. The children were crying, "abuna, abuna" - "our father, our father" - he says. They had thought he was dead. They stayed on the mountain for five days before they felt safe enough to come off it and to begin the trek towards the city of El Fashir. It took them four nights and four days. In his white turban and jellaba, into one sleeve of which he has tucked a long knife in a leather sheath, Bashir sits on a ragged mat under a thin metal and bamboo frame over which a sheet of plastic has been pulled to shield those beneath it from the sun. This crude shelter, no more than 8ft wide and 10ft long, on the edge of the vast Abou Shouk refugee camp outside El Fashir, is home to Bashir, Umal and their seven children. Most of those in the camp have tents or stick frames covered by plastic sheeting. Some have even built small enclosures from twigs, inside which they are cultivating tiny crops of corn, but there are still some who must live out in the open, each assembling what shelter they can from what materials they find lying around. On the tarmac at the edge of the runway at nearby El Fashir airport stand three Sudanese air force helicopter gunships, painted in green and black, missile struts under the stubby wings. They are the same sort of helicopters that Bashir and Umal last saw in February when the village was attacked. They have not seen them since, they say, though sometimes the Antonovs circle overhead. For the moment, there are no more bombings, but Bashir and Umal are in no doubt about what happened to them that day five months ago. But the Sudanese government will not accept that it could be in the wrong. The government's print mouthpiece, the Sudan Vision - "An Independent Daily", as it describes itself on the masthead - is full of stories about the wrong done to the country by the UN, and especially by Britain and the United States. Bashir and Umal do not care about that. They have lost everything. We are suffering, they say, we need help. We don't want to go back to the village now because the Janjaweed are still killing. Others have ventured back, but if they see the Janjaweed they run away. "They want to finish people," Bashir says. "They don't want the sud black Africans ." They think they will stay for now. They have heard about the UN resolution, but are not sure what it will change. "All we are doing is sustaining our lives," Bashir says. "We have nothing." |
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Copyright ©2011 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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