News Search Search this site or the web powered by FreeFind Site search Web search Story archive		June 14, 2004, Scotsman HER ONLY CHANCE, TO RUN AWAY BLINDLY Gethin Chamberlain THERE are soldiers on the far side of the border, Sudanese soldiers, washing themselves by a water tank next to the dried-up wadi which runs between Chad and Sudan where it passes through the town of Tine. On one side is Tine Chad, on the other Tine Sudan. Tine Sudan sits just a short distance away from the wadi; a few brown mud buildings on the crest of a low, sandy rise. Along the edges of the wadi there are trees and achayro bushes, with their thick oval leaves, and on the Chad side, a rough wooden fence of sticks a few yards from the bank of what will become, when the rains arrive in the next few weeks, a wide river. The fence runs only a short distance; beyond that, there are no physical barriers separating the two countries. A person could walk across, if they wanted to risk the anger of the Sudanese soldiers. No civilians live in Tine Sudan, only soldiers. The people who lived in the town are long gone, driven out by the combined efforts of the Sudanese government and the Arab Janjaweed militia in its pay. It was across this wadi that Maka Mousa came four months ago. She was running blindly through the night, desperate to get away from the Sudanese soldiers and the militia who had attacked her village. She ran and ran all night, stumbling across the open scrubby bush, heading in the direction of what she hoped might be safety. She did not know for sure that she had made it until the dawn light came and she could look back across the wadi to Tine Sudan. Until that night, Maka lived with her husband and her two children, a boy of five and a girl of three, in the village of Hillelia on the Sudanese side of the border. They were happy, she says, and by the standards of Sudan, well off. They had money for the things that they needed. There had already been many killings in other villages before the night the soldiers came, but until then, the family had been spared. But that night their lives were turned upside down. The first they knew of the attack was when they heard the bombs exploding, and then there were men with guns on horses, and in vehicles, and they scattered in all directions. "There were a lot of people and they were armed and some of them were on horses, and there were planes bombing and there were people in vehicles shooting," she says. Maka and her family ran, but it was too late. Her husband was killed in front of her, but the men were still shooting and she did not dare turn back. She was too afraid even to look for her children. She just fled into the darkness with the others, her only thought to get away from the bullets and the bombs. "Everyone was running away, I didn't know where my children were or my husband - everyone was just running. We were afraid," she says. Maka cries as she tells the story, the tears cutting a ragged path through the dust caking her face. She ran to Cornay, the nearest town, and hid there for a day, but she heard the soldiers were coming to kill the survivors. So she ran again, to Basau, another village. But she already knew there was no hope. She had to head for the border, with or without her family. "I ran all night to cross the border," she says. "There were a lot of people with me. I did not know what to do, I did not know where the soldiers were. I was completely afraid." If there were soldiers at the wadi, the darkness prevented them from spotting the fleeing refugees. "In the night I did not think that I had crossed the wadi, but after a time I knew I was in Chad. I knew that in Chad there was peace." With her green headscarf wrapped around her, Maka sits on a dirty white hessian blanket spread out in the dust in front of a windbreak fashioned from a blue scarf strung between two sticks pushed into the ground a little way from the edge of the town of Tine Chad. The refugees call this place the Village of the Clothes. Spread out across an open piece of land, people who have made it across the border away from the slaughter in Darfur have gathered to wait. They have heard that the aid agencies are collecting people from such places and taking them further away from the border into Chad, to proper camps where there is water and food and tents in which they can shelter. In the Village of the Clothes, there is nothing. There are maybe 400 people scattered across a patch of open ground the size of a couple of football pitches, each little group huddled in front of a shelter much like Maka's, everyone using whatever they have been able to find. There is little for them to use; there are few trees in such a harsh landscape on the edge of the desert, and only a few bushes. The people here are mostly women and children; there are a few older men, but no young men or teenagers. Behind Maka, the twin minarets of the town mosque rise up, the highest point on an otherwise flat landscape this side of the border. She has been here four months now. The only possessions she has are the clothes she was wearing the night that the soldiers arrived at her village, and a blanket that the local people gave her to keep her warm from the chill of the night. She believes that her children may have been picked up by an aunt who also fled across the border; that is what she has heard, though she does not know where they are. The loss of her children hurts more than the hopelessness of her own position. "In the morning and the night I cannot sleep, I am thinking about my children," she says. Now all she can do is wait. Local people sometimes bring food, and she has a little grain to keep her going. She has placed her faith in the lorry that will one day come to take her to the refugee camp in Mile and away from the Village of the Clothes. "I have heard that they are taking people to Mile, so I am waiting," she says. But another day passes, and there is still no place on the trucks for Maka. The wadi Maka crossed runs from north to south. It marks the border in Tine before cutting inland and rejoining the border at Bahai about 70km further north. Here it is easier to cross, and the only men with guns on the Sudanese side are rebels from the Sudanese Liberation Army. They drive up in Toyota pick-ups to talk to the women who have crossed over the border from their temporary homes a little way away on the open land on the Chadian side of the border. The women wander across the wadi with no obvious concern. There has been no sign of the Sudanese army this close to the border and the rebels are strong in this area. The people in Bahai are in a worse position, if that is possible, than those in Tine. Drawn to the northern desert area by the availability of water at the well on the Sudanese side and by rumours that transport to the established refugee camps may be available, they have strewn themselves across the plain, building makeshift shelters from sticks and branches and bits of blanket. Bahai is not a camp, more an accumulation of people spread over a vast area. The humanitarian organisations have no idea about how many people are there; they are simply impossible to count. Their animals graze on the little bits of shrubbery they can find. The bodies of those creatures too weak to continue lie where they fell, mummifying in the heat. There is little more food for the people living inside the circles of sticks that they have placed around their shelters to keep the animals out; they have a little, but not so much that the sight of a child chewing the bark from sticks is anything but commonplace. The aid workers worry that when the rains come, Bahai will be cut off from outside help, and that the people will fall victim to disease and starvation. Sittatdar Ali stands by the well, her plastic container full of water resting by her feet. A couple of her seven children stand nearby. She has been here five months, fleeing across the border when what she describes as the Arabs - the Janjaweed - burned her village. She is not worried about living so close to the land she escaped; if there is shooting, she says, she will move on again. She is worried about the rains coming, she says, but the aid people have told her they will send them to another place soon, because local people will not accept them. There is not enough water to go around, she says. "They want us far away, not in their town. This place is our place. They say we are in their fields." As she stands there, more people cross the wadi and walk away through the trees on the Sudanese side. People often go back into Sudan, she says, because they want to try to fetch their animals, or possessions they left behind, or to find family members who did not make it to the border. Those who return bring news of more killings, more burnings. "Every day they are killing people and burning houses," she says. "We heard of eight or nine people killed near our village just a little while ago. People go back there in the night, but all the towns are burnt. "Sometimes they find something belonging to them; usually they find nothing." Some of the men go back across the border to fight as rebels. Her own husband has been gone for ten days now, and she knows that if he is caught, he will be killed. But she is not worried; he has been back across the border before and it takes at least eight days to make the trip. "It is up to God what happens to him now," she says.
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