News Search Search this site or the web powered by FreeFind Site search Web search Story archive		June 12, 2004, Scotsman SUDAN: THE PERSECUTION OF A PEOPLE: OUTSIDE THE FOOD TENT, THE WOMEN ARE WAITING PATIENTLY. THEY HAND OVER THEIR CARDS AND ARE GIVEN A MEAGRE RATION Gethin Chamberlain, On The Sudan Border THE sides of the road to Iridimi are littered with the bodies of dead donkeys. The animals arrived with the refugees who have flocked into the camp which sprawls across the flat plain a little way from the Sudanese border, but the journey left them weak, and unable to survive in the fierce heat of a June day. Far above, a few wisps of white cloud hang almost motionless in the pale -blue sky. The road to the camp barely deserves the description, in places just a couple of ruts between scrubby bushes, in others a stretch of sand defined only by the tyre tracks from the vehicles which have passed the same way earlier in the day. The camp comes into view suddenly, a sea of white plastic sheeting appearing through the heat haze, each sheet draped across a frame of branches culled from the ground outside the outer perimeter and resting on walls of interwoven sticks, brushwood and, here and there, an expanse of hardened mud. Near to the point where the road peters out, a dense queue of women and children in clothes of primary colours waits in front of a canvas tent, in ten lines, each at least 100 people long. Many have been there since dawn, standing patiently in the full glare of the burning sun. There are no men in the queue. It takes a while to notice this, this absence of men. But then the eye becomes accustomed to the shape of the figures standing in line or lying inside their makeshift shelters, and it becomes suddenly more obvious. There are hardly any men in the camp at all. Nor are there many teenagers. Iridimi is a place of mothers and young children. Two days ago Mariam Mousa Abakar shared her small hut with her three children, Nabil, eight, Mubarak, four and Afra, two. Now there are just two. Afra had been coughing a great deal, especially during the night. Ms Mousa Abakar thinks he may have had malaria. Whatever it was that had made him sick, he died yesterday. So now there are just the three of them. She says she has been in the camp for a month and a half. The family used to live in Sudan but then her husband left to find work in Libya. Soon afterwards, she heard stories of Arab militiamen attacking neighbouring villages. "We heard the Arabs had been attacking villages so we ran away," she says. She put the children on donkeys and they set off for the border with Chad. When Ms Mousa Abakar reached the border town of Tine, United Nations staff sent them on to the transit camp at Iridimi to remove them from the danger of further attacks by the Sudanese government-backed Arab Janjaweed militias which have conducted a genocidal campaign against the black African inhabitants of the Darfur region of Sudan, and which continue to launch attacks across the border against refugees who have taken shelter in Chad. Iridimi is full of such stories. The camp is packed with refugees, at least 15,000, with more arriving daily. It was only planned to hold about 5,000, but when others found out about its existence, another 9,000 made their own way there, by truck, by donkey or on foot. It is a six-hour drive to the nearest major city, Abeche, 120 miles to the south-west, along a potholed and rubble-strewn dirt road which plunges into wadis that are dry now, but will soon disappear beneath a torrent of water as the rainy season takes hold. From time to time those travelling the route pass a village by the side of the road, grass-roofed huts enclosed within palisades also made from dried grass. Between the villages, a few people tend herds of camels, donkeys and cattle. Occasionally, a lone rider on a camel trots past. The countryside is poor, desperately poor, barely able to support those who live there already. The arrival of the refugees has placed great strain on what meagre resources they had. In the lines outside the food tent, the women wait patiently, clutching white plastic sacks and an assortment of containers of all shapes, colours and sizes. In groups of two or three they are summoned forward to enter the cool shade of the interior, through which a gentle breeze moves the warm air. Each hands over their ration card to be clipped, and their name is ticked off on the list of those registered to receive a daily ration. For each person, there is 425g of sorghum, 50g of semolina, 25g of oil, 50g of beans and 5g of salt. Once their cards have been punched, the women make their way past the sacks of grain and cans of oil stacked inside, and out again into the sunlight where others will measure out their entitlement. Mariam Mahamat Savil has been waiting in line since 6am. "It is like this every day," she says. Every day she goes to join the queue at 6am; sometimes it can take until 2pm before she can collect her ration. The problem, she says, is the sun. It is very hard to be out in the sun for so long. She says she has heard of women who have been taken ill and who have died in the hospital because of the heat, though she does not know their names. One was very old, she says, but the others were young. Ms Mahamat Savil arrived in Iridimi six months ago. "We were kicked out by Omar al-Bashir the president of Sudan and the Arabs. They were firing at us," she says. "Some of my family are here, some of them were killed. We listened and we heard the sound of aeroplanes so we ran away." She says the planes, Sudanese Antonovs, dropped bombs on the village. Later, she says she was told, the Janjaweed arrived to take away those girls who had not managed to get away, and some children. "They killed the children and took away the girls to be slaves to them," she says. Ms Mahamat Savil is 25 and married with four children. She says the family escaped, though two of her cousins died. At first, they fled to the town of Mbouroy, but soldiers attacked them there, so they went to Cornay, and the same thing happened, and again in Kharawiya. In the end, they decided that the only place they could be safe was across the border in Chad, so they crossed over into Tine, where they stayed for three months before aid workers transported them to Iridimi. "We came here because there was peace here and they could not find us here in Chad," she says. "We are doing what the white people the aid workers are telling us to do. If the white people tell us to stay here for 100 years, we are ready to do it because the white people give us peace and food and in Sudan there is a war." From a small rise at the edge of the camp, where the aid workers have set up large water holders which they fill from a nearby wadi, the scale of Iridimi becomes clear. The shelters are crammed tightly together, in some places just a few feet apart. Each has been constructed by its occupants from whatever raw materials they have been able to find, bits of wood gathered from the ground around the camp, mud made from mixing water with the fine dust which covers the plain and the ubiquitous white plastic sheeting. Some are just a basic circle, with a door in the front, at the most six feet high. Others are more elaborate, with additional walls tacked on to surround a cooking area, or a store for straw for the donkeys and other animals which they are allowed to graze outside the camp. Children sit outside in what shade the walls offer, or hide inside in the small spaces that double as living and sleeping quarters. There are no individual latrines; a few shared facilities are scattered around the camp, but there are only enough for one for every 300 people. The aid workers in the camp know it is not enough. Howard Hollingsworth, from the charity Care, says Iridimi was only ever intended to be a transit camp. Instead, it is rapidly expanding into a permanent facility. Those running it are desperate to put up tents to provide proper shelter before the rains begin in earnest. Some rain has already fallen in Abeche; now it will only be a matter of weeks, or even days, before it is the turn of Iridimi. There is not enough food, not enough fuel, not enough medical equipment; they are running out of time. Outside her hut, Samira Issa stirs the pot in which she is cooking food for her mother, Asha, her sister Muna and brothers Haroun, Hassan and Adam, who share the tiny space of no more than eight feet by ten feet in area. On the floor there is a rush mat; on the walls hang a couple of cloth bags containing clothes. There are three water containers, a large bowl containing dried beans, some blankets and grain sacks. There is nothing else inside. The 20-year-old arrived six weeks ago from Tine. Two days ago, her father, Issa Charfaddine - who had stayed in Tine to find work as a tailor - succumbed to illness and died. She says the family used to live in the Sudanese town of Cornay, but left when the Sudanese air force began its bombing campaign and drove people from their homes. They crossed the border at Tine, and built a makeshift home outside the town, using old clothes draped over a wooden frame. They stayed there until her father took them to the camp at Iridine. She is not sure what will become of them now. "We will be here - what can we do?" she says. "We can't go back to Sudan at the moment, but maybe, once peace is restored." But with daily reports of fresh attacks on the inhabitants of Darfur by Sudanese forces and the Janjaweed militia, and an apparent determination on the part of those opposed to the Khartoum regime to fight on to the bitter end, peace seems a very long way away. And Ms Issa has her own explanation for why it is that Iridimi appears to be a camp without men. "Some of them were killed and some were wounded, but they could not kill all of the men like this. The others have gone back to Sudan to fight."
		................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved.