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August 5, 2004 THE CHILD VICTIMS OF JANJAWEED ONSLAUGHT Gethin Chamberlain THE last time Abaker Khalil saw his son Nuradeen, the boy was sprawled across the back of a camel, behind the figure of its Janjaweed rider, disappearing through a cloud of dust kicked up by the militia as they rode out of the North Darfur town of Tawila. His other son, Yassin, was behind another rider; it would be three days before Mr Khalil saw him again. The attack had come without warning. Although it was a Friday, the Muslim holy day, the market place in the North Darfur town was open and thronged with people. Business was brisk in the line of shops set into the arches of a long brick building running the length of one side of the market-place. It was about 8am when the first riders galloped in on horses and camels, clutching their AK47 automatic rifles and heavier machine-guns. There were thousands of them; the people in the town say 3,000, 4,000; they argue among themselves. No-one is quite sure how many. It was pandemonium. "The people were surprised," one man says. "They attacked all the town and surrounded the people and they were shooting them. They were whipping them with long whips for the animals, they were whipping the women and children like animals. "Some were raping. They were raping the schoolgirls. When they saw a schoolgirl they would follow her into her home and they raped her. They looted the animals and what they wanted, took the little boys to look after their animals, and started a fire in the buildings." Abaker Khalil saw all of this. "They were shooting at the people and the people were running here and there," he says. As he watched, two riders bent down and took hold of his sons, hauling the boys up behind them. "They grabbed my sons and put them on the backs of the camels." He could do nothing. The men in the market-place say that as many as 150 boys were taken by the Janjaweed to tend the animals they had seized in the raid. For three days, he heard nothing. Then Yassin reappeared. He had escaped from the Janjaweed and run back to find his father. "They beat them and hurt them with whips so as to frighten them. But after three days he managed to escape. He was hanging back in the line with the animals and he ran away." Some other boys also managed to escape; 28 have made it back to the village. The rest are still with the Janjaweed. No-one has tried to get them back, although some police in the town know where the Janjaweed are camped. Nuradeen was one of those who did not get away. Mr Khalil continued to search for his son but found no trace of him. He thinks his son is still with the Janjaweed. He hopes that perhaps the aid agencies will help to get him back. Nuradeen and Yassin are both eight years old, born a few months apart to each of Mr Khalil's two wives. The people in the market-place say 140 people died that day in February, with more deaths in the surrounding villages. One man describes how nine men from his village had their hands bound by the militia before they were shot dead. "I saw nine people killed in front of me," he says. "There were three of them doing the shooting. They made the men lie down and they shot them. They had their hands tied up. They shot them all over." In front of the burned-out shops, a small boy pushes an empty wheelbarrow down the street. He weeps as he describes how his father, Adam, was killed. The Janjaweed shot him, he says, the tears running down his face. Now he lives with his mother and brother. But even though the men are talking, they are nervous. People are afraid to go out of the village, they say, because they think the Janjaweed will find them. They are afraid that even in the market-place there are people listening to what they say who will repeat it to others who will come to punish them. The Janjaweed seem to get on well with the local police; only the day before, some of the horsemen had ridden into town with their weapons on display. They went to the local police station, then shopping in the market place. Today, Tawila is a town living in fear. All that remains of the building that housed the shops is a burned-out shell. No-one has tried to rebuild the shops; they stand empty, their walls blackened with soot, no clues as to what they sold or about the lives of the people who made their living there. Around the edges of the town hundreds, possibly thousands, of people have set up home, in shelters of sticks and brushwood and straw and whatever was to hand when the families arrived in the town. Many of the shelters are new; some of the sticks are still green. This is where the people from the outlying villages live now, abandoning their homes, homes that survived the Janjaweed onslaught earlier in the year. Tawila has 5,540 households, according to workers with the UK-based Save the Children charity, who are trying to support those who continue to arrive. The new arrivals receive a plastic sheet, three blankets, four pieces of soap and three ten-litre jerry cans to be filled with water. Of these households only 1,822 are original residents; the remaining 3,718 have come from outlying villages. Everywhere signs of the fear that dogs this region are visible. In the villages alongside the dirt road that leads to Tawila, more people have come in from the outlying areas, their fresh shelters contrasting with the sun -bleached straw of the thatched roofs of the houses beyond. Even in the main centres, the air of unease is noticeable. Sudanese soldiers wander around the market-place in El Fashir in their dark green uniforms. There are more soldiers on the edge of the town, at the checkpoints that dot the road north towards the towns where people are drawn in search of what security there is to be found in Darfur. On a low hill a short distance from the road, another soldier keeps watch over the surrounding plain. Save for the occasional hill and the mountains in the distance, it is a flat landscape. Vegetation is limited to the low osher bushes with their thick blue -green leaves, the odd tree here and there, and every now and again a small area of regular planting, where people from villages set back from the road have planted crops. But no-one is tending the crops, because they are afraid of being attacked. Only on the outskirts of Tawila can women be seen ploughing the dry earth. The rains are late this year, but they will start in earnest soon. Then the roads will become impassable for days. No-one will be able to get into Tawila and the villages around it to find out whether the government is keeping its promise to disarm the Janjaweed and make the country safe enough for the people to return to their homes. The evidence today offers little hope that much will change in the coming weeks. |
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Copyright ©2011 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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