Deep Field (12 page)

In the storm that engulfed us, stinging our eyes and choking us, we walked through an abandoned town where shot-up schools, abandoned shops and bombed wells loomed out of the grey, stinging particles. Near the border of Chad, a child came up to me holding his head and said the single word ‘
malade
’ before disappearing again into the dust.

Camels and goats gathered round a waterhole, tended by women in vibrant reds and yellows to the sound of a water pump’s constant grind and hammer. Near our car a man, slightly older than the rest, laughed insanely and struck poses with a Kalashnikov and a makeshift wooden cross-brace, egged on by the men in search of entertainment after a long drive. Eyes wide, hair wild in matted dreadlocks, grinning, aiming, firing—the sound of imitation gunshots rasping from his distended throat. I took away the cameras and disbursed the teams to get them away from this pitiful, derelict sight. Our rebel escort looked on impassively from their battered camouflage technical, the turbaned commander the only adult among them, aside from the driver. A fourteen-year-old stood listlessly holding a rocket launcher and watched with expressionless eyes as the old man re-fought a war with invisible weapons and an invisible enemy in front of him.

I walked away from the cars and away from the waterhole—the dinning of the pump slowly fading away, the small huts becoming swallowed up in the dust and the uniformly dun-coloured horizon. And on I walked, striding now to get away form the others, almost at a run, so good to use my limbs again after being in the car, away from engines, the crackle of radio contact, the bucking and lurching of the Buffalo as it careened over ruts and ridges in the sand. Behind me was the escort commander, unarmed this time, barefoot in camouflage uniform, and the village elders in white gowns and turbans carrying the walking sticks that marked their high office. On we walked, fast, deliberate, purposeful, away from the village to the forest where the people now lived.

Once again I led but was blind to the surrounds, absorbed in walking, swinging limbs, clearing my head from the perpetual din and fear. I felt relieved to be outside, away from the others, on my own, moving faster and keeping a slight distance in front of the elders and the commander. A sense of purpose had returned after the jarring chase of the cars. But I missed what we were there to see. At a sharp call from behind me, I turned into a thinly shaded forest and saw for the first time houses buried deep inside—camouflaged, all but invisible.

Here was almost a scene of normality: children played under the watchful eye of their mothers, preparations were beginning for evening meals, fires were being stoked, wood collected. There were no young men—they were away, fighting, moving in a perpetual arc from refugee camps where they were registered and could collect food and organise themselves politically, to their farmland, which they sought to defend, and to their families in hiding in the forest. The houses were made of interlaced branches and thatched roofs built around the base of the tree trunk—barely visible from the ground and completely invisible from the air.

‘We came here because of the Antonov,’ they said. ‘Here we are safe, they cannot see us in the forest.’

They had been driven there a year ago. The Antonov had bombed the town and a subsequent land assault by government-sponsored militia had pushed them back, the rebels fighting for the land. Periodically the Antonov returned but there had not been any further land attacks. The defence had not saved the houses but had saved most of the people—already, cowering from the air raid, they heard the land attack revving before dawn.

‘I am just a farmer,’ an old man told me and reached down quickly, hands trembling, for a cigarette.

And they were not alone. In town after town the same stories of displacement and dislocation were repeated. The mere sound of the Antonov was enough to send people fleeing for the trees and the wadis. Sometimes it just flew over, sometimes bombs would fall, sometimes it was the fatal foreplay for a dawn assault of technicals. Outside another village, I came across a small group of men sitting under a tree. There were about twenty of them and the silence was uncanny. No, they were not from the local village, but they had taken refuge there—under the tree—and had brought some of their animals following a surprise attack only two days before. In the insane calculus of desperation and destruction some of the men had taken as many animals as they could—the income and livelihood of the tribe. They had left women, children and the elderly to find what sanctuary they could in the care of other members of the tribe. But now, having escaped, they feared the worst—that those left behind had been caught in the suddenness of the attack, butchered or raped. As we talked, the temperature rose and the exhausted listlessness was replaced quickly with increasing anger and agitation as the men began to find voice and rage. They were now sleeping rough on the outskirts of the village and knew nothing of what had happened to their families or where they were, but thought that the
janjawiid
militia might follow them into Dar Zaghawa, even though they suspected that the majority had been killed in the attacks. One man—tall, dark-skinned, and dressed with an extraordinary dignity—came to me with a book. Abdul Aziz Adum Haroon, the village teacher, had written down all the names of the people in the village before the attack, and had the foresight to take the book with him as he fled. There were 6200 names.

In this atmosphere of fetid hopelessness we worked. And as we talked, stories began to emerge. We came with nothing but our forms to guide us in recording the conditions in which they lived, and told them that we could not deliver or promise anything. We needed information—who, where and what. But nobody seemed to mind; in many ways just our being there mattered—a presence from the outside, a sign of interest and concern, however small and insignificant. For many, simply telling their story was important in itself. Some people told us about their daily routines—the quests for water, food, the bitter taste of ground berries. On more than one occasion, I was taken aside and shown the scars of previous attacks: bullet markings, knife cuts. ‘This is what they did—and this’. But always there was the deafening silence of the dead—the subtext of every conversation, the unstated absence in every village, stories present but untold. The only real grief I saw was for a survivor: an elderly man, now largely blind and physically weak, saying farewell to his daughters who had made the decision to send him to a refugee camp, where he might have some hope of food and care. In that village near the Chad border they could barely feed themselves, let alone those who had become dependent, and Darfur is not a place where people grow old. The children here had discoloured hair and enlarged stomachs and they were strangely passive, not moving as the flies settled in numbers around their eyes.

Some had decided to move to the camp, others made the calculation that they would risk staying behind—perhaps to be closer to land, farms or family. To all of us watching it was obvious that, alone and old, the man would not last long. I stood aside, held our convoy, and waited for this last horrendous farewell.

But there were moments of magic too. I laid out a reed matt on the ground each evening and slept outside. One night, unable to sleep, I climbed over the pile of protective sandbags that was our nominal defence, and took the most miraculous night-time stroll of my life, following a moonlit path across a wadi and into Chad. It is the night sky I remember most. I had first become captivated by this in Pakistan where, when work finally finished for the night, I would go out into the winter cold and look up to see the small rust-coloured dot of far-distant Mars—fittingly alien amid the profound disturbance of the earthquake zone where I was working. In Darfur’s desert—seen from space, nothing more than a vast tract of darkness—it became possible to look forward to the pyrotechnic brilliance of the night sky. At a certain point after dinner, conversation would stop and people would lie on the ground gazing upwards, transported for the night, away from the sun, the heat and the political realities of the day.

We were generally well looked after by the SLA. They accompanied us on all the roads with their battered technicals and teenage soldiers. They dressed themselves in camouflage turbans with arms tightly bound with numerous
hijab
—small leather pouches containing Koranic verses. Rocket-propelled grenades were strapped to the sides and bonnet of the cars.

The African Union also had a small presence where we stayed in the deserted town called Um Baru. Here, French-speaking Senegalese troops were commanded by a fat Libyan with a large lapel badge showing Colonel Gaddafi waving to a crowd (it was rumoured that when you turned the badge upside down you got a hologram of Hawaiian dancing girls). However, while the colonel and our SLA escort sipped tea and chatted cordially, this relationship was deeply strained. Only a week before, the SLA had attacked the African Union and killed five Senegalese soldiers. Now they were blocking African Union access to the waterhole in murderous protest against the ineffectiveness of this force in stopping the war.

Fearing attacks on the African Union compound, we stayed instead with the SLA, who provided us with a ‘guesthouse’, a term that proved somewhat misleading. There was a small concrete bunker with disturbing graffiti scratched into the walls by deranged SLA soldiers. It showed technicals and roughly drawn human outlines shooting fireballs at each other. The other facility was a slaughter area which featured a small tree where a goat (that evening’s meal) would be tethered among the carcasses of its caprine cousins.

Out of SLA territory, however, we had less luck. Our car broke down and a driver decided to embark on amateur mechanics. This turned into brake surgery and he eventually discovered that he could not get the dismantled parts back together. After five hours of his banging and cursing, we realised that we could not make it through the next GoS checkpoint and into the nearest town before nightfall. The checkpoints are nothing more than soldiers dug defensively behind rock or on top of a hill commanding the road. These are sensitive areas and have to be approached carefully—the soldiers are undisciplined. They resemble a militia more than a regular army and are often hard to see. After dark, they have orders to shoot on sight. We managed to tow the car back 10 kilmetres to the previous checkpoint and spoke to the commander, who reluctantly allowed us to camp in a wadi under the GoS command post on a neighbouring hill. It was an uneasy night—we circled our four cars (one with a defunct back wheel, another with a severely bent front axle) and could not light a fire, cook, or turn on our torches for fear of being shot at. The sand was soft and warm and the night sky brilliant, but at the change of the guard the new commander took a dislike to us and at 5am sent a dozen men with rocket launchers to move us on.

The strain of the previous night then began to turn into farce. We managed to get our car to the next checkpoint (breaking two steel towropes) and rather uneasily left it there, all fourteen people and one sheep piling into the two remaining operable vehicles and limping along as fast as the bent axle would take us. After several overcrowded and dehydrated hours we reached the town of Kutum—the nearest big town with international agencies and the possibility of food and showers. We made our way to the World Food Program where, despite no food or sleep for two days, we tried to find a mechanic to go back through the Damra with us to claim our car before it was annexed by one or other of the militias. Standing around making calls on satellite phones, unshaven and unwashed after ten gruelling days in the field, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a delegation that included the newly appointed global head of the World Food Program. In fact, we were so well-placed that we formed a grotty and accidental greeting committee: shaking hands, smiling, welcoming the dignitaries to the compound in front of innumerable cameramen, coiffed PR officers and other equally pomaded lackeys dug up for the occasion. After three arduous weeks in the desert, a passing witness to the imbecility and human cost of war, I stood for a moment in front of one of the most influential humanitarians in the world.

‘Where’s my yoghurt?’ she said …

WHILE THE PAKISTAN
earthquake had seemed to some extent solvable, armed conflict presents a deeper challenge to the ambitions of humanitarians. Natural disasters are classified as ‘complicated’ while conflicts are deemed ‘complex’. In the earthquake, despite the many challenges, there was a sense that emergency needs, at least, were to some extent finite. A particular number of homes had been lost, a specific number of people had been affected. Therefore, if the relief effort went well and was well-funded, emergency needs could be met—the technocratic thinking that underpins the actions of every relief agency and funds a growing number of disaster statisticians, information managers, epidemiologists and demographers.

Conflict is different and altogether murkier. When I stood on top of that Muzaffarabad rubbish pile and was offered a job working in Darfur, I was told that this was a place where we were ‘really needed’. But in conflict, the calculations of disaster statisticians matter less and are used indicatively—to paint a picture, rather than to guide the response. When I arrived in Darfur in 2007, estimates of the humanitarian consequences of the war varied. Initially, 200,000 had been killed in the fighting but this figure seemed too low. It was increased in 50,000 increments over the months to 250,000 before finally averaging out at 350,000. The point was not about the figures but to say that, no matter how accurate they were, they were morally incalculable. Each number represented a brutal, preventable enumeration of each individual death and loss. No known measure exists to quantify brutality, and statistics are brushstrokes in the portrayal of destruction. The vagueness of numbers (except for those of the agencies that keep detailed records of how many people they are feeding or providing medical treatment, which in any case only poorly symbolise an event) was an indication of the uncertainty of humanitarian agencies. The ‘solutions’ to the Darfur crisis did not lie in tents and tarpaulins, food distributions or medical programs, life-saving though these interventions are, but in the political and military calculations made by the Sudanese state and its militia allies—policies over which no aid agency has any influence.