The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (13 page)

“Malekum salaam,”
he answered.

“
Humdallah
,” I continued.

“
Humdallah
,” he replied. This is the standard exchange.

I said his car seemed excellent and that I had heard he was a good driver. “I am very good,” he replied with no smile.

I explained where I wanted to go with my American journalist.

“I have never been across that wadi into Darfur,” he said. “And I think I never want to go. Their fighting comes over here enough.”

I explained that the American would pay well and the trip would be short, about six hours. Back before dark tonight. I added, “God willing,” which is often said anyway.

“No, I’m scared to go,” he said. “I have two children and a wife. It is too dangerous.”

I said he would be paid the full day rate, and for two full days. Ali’s friends—there is always a swirl of people in such places—began to pay attention to our conversation. “That money is very good,” they advised him. “Ali, you should do this. Two days’ pay just to run over there and back. You can do it, God willing.” As this was hardly the first time I had chartered a vehicle and driver in this market, some of them knew me and said I was very good at all this, and would not go if it was not okay. “God willing,” I added.

“No,” Ali insisted. “It is not safe to go over there.”

His friends now went to work on him. Good money for your family. Back by dark. No Antonovs in the sky and not many refugees streaming across today. Finally, reluctantly, he agreed. I could tell that he was not happy. But it was three hundred dollars, American. That is a small fortune—more than half the cost of a good camel.

We had to leave right away to make it back before dark. We bought some soda, water, and bread for the trip, and went to get Paul. I tried talking to Ali to get to know him. He had served in the army as a young man. A father, as I knew. Son of the omda, which I knew. He was too nervous about the trip to teach me much about him I didn’t know.

As we left, I told Paul to keep his satellite phone turned on. I didn’t know whom I thought we could call, but it was somehow a comfort. When we reached the wadi that separated the two countries, Ali took us expertly down into the deep water and up the other side.
Tawkelt ala Allah
, I said.
It will depend on God
. Tawkelt ala Allah, Ali repeated. We were in Darfur.

We followed the main lines of tire tracks through the desert. Ali and I glanced out the window often to see if the tracks were new or old, and whether they were from government troops or rebels.

An hour went by; we were nearly halfway there. Ali didn’t talk very much. He was extremely tense. We were all very tense.

I most feared a gunman walking into the road ahead to stop us. And in a narrow wadi of a mountainous area, this is exactly what happened. A young soldier, no more than fourteen, stood in the road with his Kalashnikov rifle. A second boy stood nearby. There were most certainly other soldiers all around us among the rocks, waiting for us to try to speed away.

I spoke calmly to Ali, telling him to slow down and stop.
“Mashalla,”
he said into the plastic of the steering wheel, strengthening himself for God’s decision. Paul
leaned forward from the back to see the trouble. I got out slowly.

The boys wore traditional clothes and had ammunition belts across their chests. I walked toward them. “Salaam malekum,” I said. They responded properly, but without warmth, as we shook hands. I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my pocket and lit one. The boys didn’t move. “Is there a problem?” I asked them. “No, nothing,” one replied.

Two somewhat older boys appeared on the left, also with guns.

“Okay, Daoud, we need you to stand over there by them,” one of the two boys who had stopped us said. He knew my name.

The other two boys took Ali and Paul out of the vehicle and were now searching it. They took Paul’s satellite phone and our soft drinks. A truck drove up with their adult commander.

“You are finally here,” he said to me. This was a bad sign. It meant that there was at least one spy in Bahai or in the other rebel group who told the government of Sudan that we were coming. The government had sent these cooperating rebels to come get us. I could think of no other explanation.

They put us back in our vehicle, with a new driver and the boy soldiers as guards.

Paul asked if I was optimistic. I laughed a little and didn’t say anything. We drove for an hour and a half southeast to a place that I knew was near the government-controlled areas.

We arrived at a rebel camp, and a truck with another
commander pulled up. I knew him. “How are you, Daoud?” he asked. “You know the government does not want you here with your hawalya?”

I told him that no one was in control of the area so I did not know whom to ask for permission. We would be happy to go back.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.

He walked over to speak to the two commanders whose soldiers had captured us. He talked with them for a long while and then came slowly and sadly back to me.

“They have some authority here. They don’t want to send you back so soon.” He asked me for a cigarette.

“Things have changed a lot, Daoud; it’s not the same. Things are all mixed up right now.” He walked away and one of the other commanders came up to tell me that Paul and Ali were to stay in our vehicle and I was to go with him. I asked him what was going on.

“Please don’t argue with me,” he said. “We are going to take you back to Chad.”

I said that I would rather travel with my companions, for whom I was responsible.

“If you go back to be with Ali and Paul, that is your choice, your fate.”

If it had been another kind of time, perhaps I would have accepted the ride back to Chad. But my job was to get the reporters into Darfur safely, and to get them out, and nothing else seemed to matter. So it was easy to thank him and go join Paul and Ali for whatever awaited us. Soldiers packed in beside us in our own truck and we were driven a long way through the desert.

“This is not good, Paul.” I explained that we were heading into the area where the government of Sudan had its army camps.

Paul wasn’t happy to hear this. Ali was sullen. He was always sullen, but now more so.

We arrived at an empty, destroyed village the rebels were using as a base, and were made to sit in an open area by a mud wall. A little food and water was given to us. Ali and I had our wrists tied behind us with thin plastic rope that hurt. Paul was taken in another direction. His wrists were not tied, which I took as a good sign for him.

Ali and I sat there all day, getting hot and thirsty in the sun. In the late afternoon, three vehicles came into the village carrying three rebel commanders. I could soon see Paul talking to one of them in English. He had his notebook out and was interviewing him. Amazing. I laughed a little and pointed with my head so Ali would notice. Paul later walked near us with the commanders and said he believed they would let us go soon. I didn’t think this was true, at least not for Ali and me. The mud wall looked like a good wall for shooting people.

It got dark and Ali and I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Two more vehicles arrived late, and several men came over to visit us. They beat Ali with their fists, kicking him a long time with their boots. They did not beat me. They took our watches and our sunglasses, and our mattresses from the vehicle. They took Ali’s good shoes. They tried to take my shoes but I did not let them. I said I didn’t want to see my own people take my shoes. I said they could shoot me if
they needed my shoes, but otherwise I would need them while I was still alive. They went away.

Late at night they pulled us roughly to our feet and pushed us into the back of another truck. Paul was somewhere else—we had not seen him all night. I would later learn that he had been taken away in Ali’s truck to the village of Towé, where he would be beaten for three days by young soldiers drunk on date wine.

Ali and I were driven the rest of the night to a place in the mountains, stopping in the morning at a rocky place where tracks go off in a few directions. They made us get out there, so far from any town or village. In this kind of situation you can guess that you probably have about a minute to live. I saw Ali saying silent prayers with his eyes closed. That reminded me to say some, too.

They didn’t shoot us. They sat us under a tree and we waited. We got a little sleep finally. Nine rebel commanders soon arrived for a meeting a little ways away in the rocks. I knew two of the men from previous trips, from when this rebel group had not joined with the government. It was raining and each drop of it felt good on my face.

After the meeting, they came over and one said, “There’s no problem, Daoud, don’t worry.” Then they drove away. Two other commanders—field intelligence men—then began shouting at us and beating us with their fists and boots and the butts of their guns. I felt some bones breaking in my fingers where the gun hit me. Then some soldiers tied our ankles and threw us like big sacks
into the back of the truck. We continued our journey in a new direction.

When we reached another rebel base, the truck stopped and two men took my feet and two men took my arms and they swung me back and forth high out of the truck onto the rocky ground. When you are tied you can’t move to fall the right way, and the sharp rocks open your skin. This was the summer rain time, so there was not even a cushion of dust over these rocks. The same was done to Ali, and I felt so bad for having ever convinced him to make this trip—he was bounced on the sharp road from so high. From this and from the beatings, he had several broken fingers and I don’t know what else, maybe ribs. I think he passed out a little after bouncing on the road.

Our lips were blistered from so long in the sun without water. Our arms and fingers were very swollen and painful from the ropes, and now our feet, too. We were dragged under a tree and water was dribbled into our mouths and we were finally untied. We were told that we were waiting for the “crazy commander.”

After two hours the “crazy commander” pulled up in his Land Cruiser and yelled at the soldiers for untying us. He supervised the very tight tying of ropes on our wrists and behind our backs. Then he had long ropes tied to our ankles. The other ends of the ropes were thrown over high branches of the tree.

“This is very simple; I will show you how it works so you can do it whenever you need to,” he said to the soldiers. Then he turned to Ali and me with a quiet cruelty in his voice:

“I want to torture you two now and you will tell me everything you have in your minds: who sent you, what is your mission, who you are meeting, everything.”

Torture was the popular new thing because Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were everywhere in the news at that time, and crazy men like this were now getting permission to be crazy.

I was first. Three soldiers began pulling the rope, and I was turned upside down hanging from the tree. I thought,
Well, this is not so bad
. After a few minutes, however, it gets very bad. Your eyes feel like they are going to pop out. Your head throbs and you can’t breathe. They tightened the ropes on our wrists and ankles for extra pain. Then they tied the long ropes to the trunk of the tree and went away to smoke my own cigarettes as we dangled. The pain gets worse and worse until you finally cry out. I wouldn’t have thought this would be so. Of course our injuries were making everything worse—especially for Ali. From time to time they would drop us down and ask us to talk some more.

I told them again and again that I was a translator for reporters, and that the reporters were not spies; I was not a spy, and Ali was just our driver. Ali would say he had been a simple soldier in Chad a long time ago, but he was not spy. He said he had a wife and a small son and daughter, and his only job was to drive people from village to village.

They would say they didn’t believe us, and raise us upside down in the tree again. After hours of this, you cannot talk or think. That is when they finally stopped. We were dropped in heaps on the ground.

At around 10 P.M., I woke up in the darkness of the desert. Night insects were busy in our bloody cuts, and this tickling had wakened me.

“Ali. Look. We are alive.” I kicked him a little. “It’s not so bad.” In the faint light of the stars I saw his eyes move slightly.

“Yes, thank you, thank you,” he said, blowing a spider
away from his bloodied nose. “This is all very good. Thank you so much for this good trip.” We drifted back to sleep.

In the middle of the night two young soldiers picked me up and untied me. They walked me a few dozen steps away from Ali, who was asleep.

“Okay, Daoud,” one of them said. “You should go out of here now. Ali is a spy with the Chadian military so he has to stay. But our commander says you should go. Your hawalya has already been sent back to Chad. He was taken to near Bahai and he went across to Chad, and he is waiting for you there.”

“That’s good about Paul. Thanks for telling me that. But what am I going to tell Ali’s family if I go back without him?” I said. “I can’t do that. You would not do that. If you were his brothers, what would you say to someone who was responsible for your brother but left him in a dangerous situation like this?”

“Well, you are untied and we are going back to sleep, so we have done what our commander said to do.”

I was free to go, but I was also free to untie Ali so we could both make our run for freedom through the mountains. As I untied him, he asked what had been going on, as he had half heard the conversation. I explained the situation, and he insisted that I leave, especially since they had invited me to go.

“This way, you can tell my family where I am and maybe they can help get me out of this,” he said. “So you should go now”

I said that I could not face his family if I left him behind, and he understood this.

“They would ask you to pay for our truck,” he said, which made me laugh a little because I knew it was probably true. We considered going together, but decided that we would be quickly tracked down and, under those circumstances, killed. So we rubbed some life back into our poor wrists and ankles, and waited for what would come next.