Tears of the Desert (34 page)

I sat Mo on my lap and jiggled him up and down. I told him that at last his father was coming home. I sang a little song for him. It was what my parents had sung to me when I was still a child.

EPILOGUE

Every night after I finished working on this book, I would go to bed in my one-room flat in London and see in my dreams all the people who had died. I saw the fields of dead children. The rape victims. The burned villages. The slaughter. I saw the dead of my family, my loved ones.

During my darkest moments I concluded that for those who had died, life had perhaps dealt them the better hand—for the living have to live with the memories and the trauma every day, for the rest of their lives. The survivors are forced to live every day with the dark and empty holes where much-loved fathers, brothers, and mothers used to be.

For me, the scars run deep and will take years to heal.

One day as I was writing, a police helicopter circled overhead. It was obviously tracking someone. With the repeated thud-thud-thud of the rotor blades, I started to become increasingly frightened.

I covered my ears with my hands and curled up in the chair. I became increasingly panicked. “It’s inside my head . . . inside my head . . . deep inside my head . . .” I kept repeating. I was back in the hell of the day when the helicopter gunships attacked my village, followed by the murderous
Janjaweed
militia.

For the wider victims of the Darfur conflict it will take lifetimes for the trauma to heal—that’s if it ever will.

It is now almost six years since the conflict in Darfur began. Some 400,000 people have died in the conflict in Darfur, and more than 2.5 million have been forced into vast, chaotic refugee camps—which in themselves are places of hopelessness and suffering.

Time after time, the world has been alerted to the slaughter and the rape and the horror. The word “genocide” has been used, and the phrase “never again” has been repeatedly heard on the lips of world leaders. But what has actually been done to stop the slaughter?

No one should underestimate the severity of the situation in Darfur.

The following are quotes from highly authoritative sources from 2007 and early 2008, concerning the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, Manuel Aranda da Silva, said this about Darfur: “The situation is worse than it has ever been. . . . The violence and the threat to humanitarian workers continues unabated.”

United Nations World Food Program spokesperson Simon Crittle reported that: “The humanitarian situation in Darfur remains absolutely critical. At any time we could face a catastrophe if the security situation gets worse than it is already.”

A spokesperson for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders/ MSF), which has more than 2,000 staff on the ground in Darfur, stated that: “It is very difficult for aid workers to move outside the camps, which means it is hard to do exploratory missions to areas where there is need. The situation is very bad and is not getting better.”

Aid agency Danish Church Aid concluded that: “We continue to work in Darfur despite the worsening security situation . . . The situation in Sudan’s Western Darfur province is worsening by the day.”

British aid agency Oxfam spokesperson Alun Macdonald declared that Darfur: “is certainly the most dangerous that it has been . . . Every place we work has had a security incident in the last three months. If it gets much worse we would certainly have to consider if we can stay at all.”

Matthew Conway, the UN’s Chad spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, stated of the humanitarian crisis: “The scale is mind-boggling. Complete desolation and destruction. And the stench, my God, the stench.”

Commenting on the ethnically targeted violence, Conway concluded: “We are seeing elements that closely resemble what we saw in Rwanda in the genocide of 1994.”

The UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, gave a briefing to the United Nations Security Council, declaring: “Our entire humanitarian operation in Darfur—the only lifeline for more than three million people—is presently at risk. We need immediate action on the political front to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe with massive loss of life. . . . In short, we may end up with a man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale in Darfur.”

The action that has been taken on the political level is to mandate a United Nations peacekeeping force for the Darfur region. The UN/ African Union Hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) mandates some 26,000 troops to go in on the ground in Darfur. In theory, UNAMID went into action in December 2007, but its implementation has been less than straightforward. In practice the force remains chronically undermanned, badly resourced, and with little of the military hardware (i.e., helicopters) required to deploy in such a remote and challenging region.

So compromised is UNAMID that the UN’s own Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, talked of the mission failing even before it was begun. “Do we move ahead with the deployment of a force that will not make a difference?” Guehenno asked. “[A force] that will not have the capacity to defend itself and that carries the risk of humiliation of the Security Council and the United Nations, and tragic failure for the people of Darfur?”

At the start of 2008, when the UNAMID peacekeepers were supposed to be on the ground in force, Jean-Marie Guehenno stressed that insecurity in Darfur had reached unprecedented levels.

While the peacekeepers fail to take hold on the ground, the humanitarian crisis has continued unabated. In 2007, some 300,000 newly displaced people flooded into already chronically overcrowded refugee camps, bringing the total to 2.6 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and refugees.

In December 2007, the UN issued a stark report warning of the effect the delay in the deployment of UNAMID peacekeepers was having on the ground. “As a result people in Darfur are beginning to lose hope, and that may be another factor taking a toll on their health. . . . These people have been in these camps for years now, and the energy that was around a few years ago and the hopes that this situation might soon be over and people could go home—all that’s gone now.”

Who is responsible for this failure to act to stop the Darfur crisis? On one level, it is the international community that has failed to muster an effective and robust peacekeeping force—one armed and manned and mandated to stop a brutal, genocidal conflict.

On another level it is the Khartoum Government—the National Islamic Front (which has recently re-branded itself the National Congress Party)—that does everything in its power to frustrate international efforts to halt the “genocide by attrition” that is ongoing in Darfur. This includes repeatedly flouting UN Security Council resolutions designed to bring about an end to the killing.

In January 2008, in just one incident alone, the armed forces of the Sudan Government deliberately attacked a UNAMID transport convoy. This attack was designed to shock and intimidate the barely nascent peacekeeping force, while signaling to the world community that Khartoum would continue to act with impunity in Darfur.

Khartoum’s obstruction of the peacekeeping mission is its way of most publicly defying the efforts of the international community to bring about an end to the suffering. How is it able to defy world opinion, repeatedly flout UN Security Council resolutions, and fly in the face of a robust stance taken by the United States, in particular, on Darfur?

The answer here is largely China. China’s unquestioning support for the Sudanese regime—disregarding its long record of brutality and horrific excess—takes powerful economic, military, and diplomatic form.

China has repeatedly abstained from, blocked, or significantly weakened a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions on Darfur, and each time to the advantage of the Khartoum regime. China has also effectively empowered Khartoum to defy the international community. Why has China done so? The answer is oil. China is a net importer of oil, with an increasing thirst for energy. Its greatest single overseas supplier is Sudan, which pumps some 500,000 barrels per day. China is also the largest single investor in Sudan today.

China’s cozy relationship with Khartoum is even more sinister. Much of the petro-dollars that China pays to Sudan for oil is returned to China in arms purchases. During the period of Sudan’s growing oil production, China has become the regime’s leading arms supplier—providing the tanks, artillery, and aircraft that have been used to wreak devastation in Darfur.

Despite a United Nations arms embargo on Darfur, the UN Panel of Experts on Darfur has repeatedly found that Khartoum completely ignores the embargo. Human rights group Amnesty International has reported that among those weapons shipped into Darfur are arms and military supplies of Chinese manufacture.

So confident is Khartoum of its ability to defy the international community that it has, in effect, laughed in the face of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC), in The Hague. In March 2005, the United Nations referred the case of war crimes in Darfur for investigation by the ICC.

In the spring of 2007, the ICC issued its first indictments, charging a Janjaweed militia leader, Ali Kushyb, and a political official, Ahmed Haroun, with a broad range of crimes against humanity. Khartoum has not only refused to extradite both men to face charges, but has treated the ICC indictment with shocking contempt, and promoted Haroun.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has repeatedly called for Haroun to be handed over for trial. “When will be a better time to arrest Haroun? How many more women, girls have to be raped? How many more persons have to be killed? What is at stake is, simply, the life and death of 2.5 million people.”

The year, 2008, is the 60th anniversary of the original Genocide Convention, the long-fought-for international agreement whereby genocide was outlawed as a crime against humanity, and where countries of the world signed an agreement to stamp it out, once and for all.

This is the key phrase of the Convention: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or time of war, is a crime under international lawwhich they undertake to prevent and punish.”

The fate of the people of Darfur now rests upon the success of the UNAMID peacekeeping mission, and its ability to enable the aid agencies to continue feeding and caring for several million internally displaced people and refugees.

In Darfur, it is high time that that phrase “prevent and punish” was made a reality. For unless it is, we may never be able to go home.

As of the date of writing this book, I have not been able to find my family, or make contact with them. I will keep searching.

H
ALIMA
B
ASHIR
London, February 2008

PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

In May 2008 Halima Bashir won her case and was granted asylum/refugee status in the UK, along with her family.

GLOSSARY