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June 17, 2004 THE LITTLE COWHERD WAS JUST TEN. THEY FOUND HER BODY RIDDLED WITH BULLETS Gethin Chamberlain WHEN the men found Fatouma Abdallah Adam, their anger overwhelmed them. Her young body had been riddled with bullets; they counted seven wounds in total. The sight of her lying there was more than any of them could bear. She had been told to look after the cattle, and when the gunmen arrived on their horses, she tried to stop them from taking the animals. But the Janjaweed had shown her no mercy. She was already dead by the time the other people who lived in the village of Gardaya in the Darfur region of Sudan felt that it was safe enough to venture back to their homes. She was just ten years old. Around her, the bodies of other villagers lay on the ground; her grandmother, Khadama Djaratnabi, lay nearby, barely alive, her wrist shattered by a bullet, blood seeping from the wound on her head where she had been slashed with a blade. Incandescent with rage, the surviving men of the village did not stop to think about what they were doing. All they knew was that they would have their revenge. They knew in which direction the Janjaweed, 150-strong, had been heading, and they knew there was a way to get in front of them. They grabbed what weapons they could find and set off to lie in wait for the men who had done this, the Arab Janjaweed militia in the pay of the Sudanese government. But the people of Gardaya and of Djokal, the neighbouring village which had been attacked at the same time, did not have any guns; all they had were some swords and a few pieces of wood. When they fell upon the Janjaweed, the horsemen cut them to pieces with their automatic AK47s. Beaten and unable to fight on, the villagers turned and fled west across the border to a wadi a little way inside Chad. They took with them what remained of their animals, vast herds of cattle and goats and donkeys and camels, and camped their families under trees around the wadi at Senette, and by the village of the same name. But the Janjaweed are no respecters of borders. Last Friday, four days after they attacked Gardaya and Djokal, they were back, riding across the border as the first light of the sun came over the horizon. Suleman Abdullah Ibrahim had fled into Chad a few months earlier when the Janjaweed attacked his village; he had taken shelter in the village at Senette. He was inside his house when he heard the sound of gunfire. "There were more than 80 of them, with horses," he says. "It was 6am and they came all together. At first I did not see them but I heard the shooting of the weapons. We ran outside and saw them. Only four of us had weapons because the Sudanese government did not let us have weapons. Those people who had weapons went outside and they were shooting at the Janjaweed. "The Janjaweed were looking for the cattle and when they saw someone they shot them. They found a man with his cattle. He did not even have time to get up. They shot him and got his cattle and rode away with them." The refugees are camped out around the wadi, their animals churning up the wet ground around the wells dug among the tall trees. The early morning light filters through the dust hanging in the air, kicked up by the animals milling around the many wells. Women and children draw water by hand to fill the bowls that the animals drink from; other children drive more animals to graze on the few trees and shrubs that are dotted across the arid land outside the wadi. A few of the men have guns, old AK47s with battered wooden stocks and shiny metal barrels, carrying the weapons slung over their shoulders. Abubakar Suleman grips the worn canvas strap of his gun and checks his bullets; he has only 40 left. The men are preparing to leave the wadi to patrol the open countryside outside, to try to offer some protection to those who have ventured further afield with their animals. Suleman Abdullah Ibrahim is one of the four men who carry weapons; his is a prized AK47 with a folding metal stock. He carries it with him wherever he goes; every day you have to carry a weapon, he explains. He stands on the edge of the wadi with the other men, a yellow scarf tied around his head and under his chin, the end dangling down over the light grey jallalabah he wears over a pair of white trousers. When the Janjaweed came, he says, he picked up his rifle and started to fire back. "The Janjaweed came up close and I shot at them." He will not say whether he hit his target, though others say that he did. "We shot at them and some of them died. Four or five of them were shot. They are always on their horses, but when we shot at them they drop off their horses. When there is a dead Janjaweed they don't want to leave him in the village. They tie a rope around the ankles and pull him away behind a horse." The sound of the shooting carried away across the sand; Chadian soldiers heard it and turned their five Toyota pick-up trucks towards the wadi. When they arrived, they fanned out across the wadi and started firing at the Janjaweed. "They were shooting at the Janjaweed. There was a lot of shooting, and the Janjaweed rode away. Some of the Chadian soldiers were killed and some of them were wounded. And some of the Janjaweed were killed too," Suleman says. There are thousands of refugees camped out along this stretch of the border, driven out of Sudan by the murderous attacks that have left hundreds of villages deserted and burned and more than a million people without homes. Some, about 95,000, have been removed by the United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organisations to refugee camps further inside Chad. Others, more than 60,000, are camped out in the open or are sheltering with relatives or sympathetic families in villages along the 600km stretch of border with Darfur. The stories told by those in this region, north of the central town of Adre, are mostly of attacks by Janjaweed, although the Sudanese government forces have also been active here. People pass backwards and forwards across the border every day; some fleeing fresh attacks, others returning to their villages by night to try to retrieve what few possessions might remain. They bring with them precious news from inside Darfur. Two weeks ago, the refugees say, Sudanese planes bombed the area around the mountain of Djabal Moune, killing as many as 200 people. Some place the figure even higher. Abubakar fled from Abu Djidad near Djabal Moune three months ago when Sudanese planes bombed the village, and the Janjaweed drove out those who had not already run. He says he heard the Sudanese planes bombing again just two weeks ago. "They were bombing on the border and we listened to the bombs," he says. "A lot of people came over the border then. We don't have houses to live in, we sleep under the trees. We don't have things to eat. Sometimes we sell a couple of cattle so we can eat. The children are suffering a lot. Always they are sick. If the situation stays like this we won't go back for ten years, but we will go home tomorrow if it ends." On a small rise looking down on the wadi, in the shade of a tree with a trunk thicker than any of the others around, three men sit watching. Zakaria Djimet Ibet, Abdallah Abdallah Abdoum Mahamat and Mahamat Adamou Ibrahim are there to try to protect the refugees, they say. They made the 30km journey to the Chadian border from Darfur only eight days ago, when the Janjaweed attacked Gardaya. "It was 4: 30 in the morning," Zakaria says. "We were in the village with the women and the children. Some of us were praying and some were not. Some of us did not have time to get our clothes. We fought against them, but there were too many soldiers and we had to cross over the border." A dozen people would die that day, some in the first attack, some in what came later. Fatouma was the only girl among them; the others were all men. Abdallah has written down all their names on a sheet of paper torn from a notebook: Yaya Abakar Isakh, Abukar Abdallah Oumar, Adam Youssouf Souley Mane, Abdel Madjid Issakh Dabodjokh, Youssouf Ibrahim Mahamat, Adoum Adam Abdallah, Abakar Souley Mane Abdallah, Fatouma Abdallah Adam, Abdallah Djouroum, Abdallah Yaya Khar Noup, Ibrahim Yaya Atim. The names are written in a light hand with a blue Biro on the lined white paper. "Fatouma was ten years old," Zakaria says. "She was with her cattle. She refused to let the Janjaweed get her cattle so they shot her seven times. She tried to escape with her cattle but they shot her. They shot all over her body. When the Janjaweed left, we came back and found her. Her grandmother was also there. She was shot in the wrist and they had slashed her head." They put Khadama, the old woman, on a donkey and sent her to the hospital, but the men stayed behind in the village. "We felt very bad. We were ready to fight," Zakaria says. "When we went back and found the bodies, we wanted revenge. We went after the Janjaweed and we found them not far from the village. We knew where they were going and we waited for them but it was a big mistake because a lot of us were killed. We did not have guns, we only had swords and sticks." A few hours later, he says, more men came in vehicles and stole many of their animals. The men argue among themselves about how many were taken but Abdallah has written that down too on his piece of paper; 450 cattle, more than 3,000 sheep. Down in the wadi, a young girl sits astride a donkey, driving it on with a stick as she follows behind a line of cows heading out in the direction of the border across which she fled with her family. From the crest of the ridge, Sudan stretches out before her, only an hour's walk away. The men lie on the ground in the shade of the tree, and watch. But they do not waste time wondering about why these things are happening to them. They say they know why they are being driven out of Darfur. "The government think that they need to eradicate the black people," Mahamat says. "The government want to just keep the white people the Arabs . They just want a nation of Arabs." |
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Copyright ©2011 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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