Where the Despair Begins

By Tina Susman | Newsday Staff Correspondent

May 14, 2006

Fatina Abakar, 15, center, who on Feb. 27, along with a group of other women, narrowly escaped a horde of janjaweed Â and quite likely rape, and possibly death Â during a routine trek from their Kalma camp homes to collect firewood. (Newsday / J. Conrad Williams Jr.)

NYALA, Sudan - In the three years and three months since war erupted in Darfur, an isolated region in western Sudan, hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been forced from their homes. On May 5, the Sudan government and one of three rebel groups reached a U.S.-brokered peace agreement raising the prospect for an end to Darfur's agony Now the region's fate hangs on whether other rebel groups sign the accord and whether the United Nations is able to deploy peacekeepers to this embattled area.

Early in the morning on Feb. 27, Fatina Abakar began a three-mile trek through the desert, a thrice-weekly trip she endures to gather wood for her family's cooking fires.

Hidden behind a distant ridge, dozens of armed men on camels waited, eyeing the wiry 15-year-old as she and scores of other women and girls trudged barefoot through the thick sand, their colorful wraps whipping like fluorescent flags against the khaki-colored landscape.

The men's plan: trap as many women as possible, rape the young ones and kill anyone who puts up too much of a fight. But the women, squinting into the searing wind as they scanned the ground for sticks and bark, spotted the predators a couple hundred feet ahead. They shouted: "Janjaweed! Janjaweed!" - the word that in Arabic translates loosely to "an armed man on a horse," and has come to define the Arab militiamen preying on non-Arabs like Fatina and her companions, borne of Darfur's indigenous African tribes.

The women turned and ran, most dropping whatever wood they had gathered. As they scattered, the marauding men and their mounts hurtled over the ridge toward the women, guns drawn.

"We heard shooting. When we started to run, they tried to make us run between them and the camp," Fatina said after scampering back to Kalma camp, home to these women and to 96,000 other people displaced by war in Sudan's southwest Darfur region. Breathless following her hurried trek, Fatina pranced excitedly in the hot sand and spoke in the giddy tone of someone who had just dodged a horrible fate and was eager to tell others about it.

"In front of me, there were five camels!" she exclaimed. "We ran! We escaped!"

So, miraculously, did the others, and as Fatina spoke, scores of other women trickled in from the desert, some still clutching precious hauls of wood, some carrying babies on their backs, some empty-handed and nearly staggering after the long, hot walk. They lingered at the edge of the camp and stared into the distance, at clouds of sand roiling beneath the tires of troops sent to investigate the incident.

Then, the women headed down a narrow path through the scrub into the heart of Kalma, a 7-square-mile labyrinth of makeshift tents and mud-brick huts that is supposed to be their refuge but has become their prison.

"These things happen every day," said Naser Bashier Kambal of the Amel Center for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, a Sudanese organization that helps victims of Darfur's war. "It's something systematic that is going on," said Kambal. "If they find women, they rape. If they find men, they kill. Every day such things happen and no one intervenes. They just move on."

Kambal's words capture the plight of Darfur, a region about the size of Texas, where a war between black African rebels and Sudan's Arab-dominated regime evolved into a state-sponsored ethnic cleansing campaign that, by some estimates, has killed 400,000 civilians and left millions struggling to survive.

Although the government and one of the three main rebel groups signed a peace accord May 5, nobody expects things to change quickly for people like Fatina. Two rebel groups oppose the deal, and the government has yet to accept the idea of UN peacekeepers to implement the agreement. In addition, the plan gives the government a full five months to disarm the dreaded janjaweed - months during which there will be no formidable force on the ground to protect civilians.

The war's fuse is lit

The war began in February 2003 when rebels, accusing the government of neglecting the remote region and its indigenous people, launched a series of assaults on military installations. The government, looking to bolster its forces there, mobilized nomadic Arab tribesmen with historic grievances against the non-Arab tribes. It promised the recruits land, livestock and other spoils of war, then - according to witnesses, the United Nations, and human rights groups - turned them loose on civilians sharing the same ethnicity as the rebels.

If anything symbolizes the plight of those civilians today, it is camps like Kalma where some 2 million people live on the edge of extinction, surviving on international charity for food and medicine, and risking rape, robbery or death if they step outside. The 7,700 African Union troops have never had the manpower or mandate to fend off marauders who, according to the UN and other groups, have operated with government support.

Numbers too big to ignore

The death toll and suffering are staggering. According to international health and human rights groups:

Anywhere from 180,000 to 400,000 people, nearly all civilians, have died. Precise figures cannot be obtained due to the region's inaccessibility and a breakdown in record-keeping resulting from the war.

Nearly half the population of 6 million would go hungry without international food aid.

Countless thousands of women and girls have been raped.