Truce Is Talk, Agony Is Real in Darfur War

[Jahness]

Truce Is Talk, Agony Is Real in Darfur War
By LYDIA POLGREEN

MENAWASHEI, Sudan, May 12 — It took three months for Fatouma Moussa to collect enough firewood to justify a trip to sell it in the market town of Shangil Tobayi, half a day's drive by truck from here. It took just a few moments on Thursday for janjaweed militiamen, making a mockery of the new cease-fire, to steal the $40 she had earned on the trip and rape her.

Speaking barely in a whisper, Ms. Moussa, who is 18, gave a spare account of her ordeal.

"We found janjaweed at Amer Jadid," she said, naming a village just a few miles north of her own. "One woman was killed. I was raped."

Officially, the cease-fire in the Darfur region went into effect last Monday.

That was three days after the government and the largest rebel group signed a broad peace agreement, creating hope for an end to the brutal assaults that have left more than 200,000 dead and have driven two million from their homes, a campaign of government-sponsored terror against non-Arab tribes in Darfur that the Bush administration has called genocide.

But the reality was on grim display in this crossroads town, where Ms. Moussa and other villagers were attacked Thursday as they rode home in an open-backed truck from Shangil Tobayi.

The Arab militiamen who attacked them killed 1 woman, wounded 6 villagers and raped 15 women, witnesses and victims said.

The attack played out like so many others in this vast, lawless region. Three men with machine guns stopped the truck on the road and fired into its cabin, shooting the driver and blowing out the tires. They ordered the passengers, about 50 men, women and children, to take the goods they were transporting — sacks of millet, two cows and five goats — to where their camels and the rest of their men were waiting in a dry riverbed a mile or two off the road. Once that labor was complete, the raiders set upon the women, raping them in turn, witnesses said.

"They told us, 'You are slaves, we will finish you,' " said Hussein Ahmed Abdulla, who stood by helpless as the women were raped. "We will not allow you to move from Menawashie, not one kilometer.' "

When the raping was done, the militiamen loaded their camels and rode off to the west. The passengers had to walk three hours in total darkness to reach here.

Afterward, Isaac Ibrahim Muhammad, the driver of the truck, lay in a hut, his left foot caked with the blood from the bullet wound in his leg.

In another hut was Hanan Ahmed Hussein, just 20 years old, delirious and murmuring with a gunshot wound to her knee. Her sister soothed Ms. Hussein's 1-year-old daughter, Menazir, in her lap. Menazir's tiny foot was encased in gauze, a red splotch of dried blood seeping through. She had been shot, too.

"They say there is a peace, but yesterday they kill us," said Aisha Adam Moussa, Ms. Moussa's aunt. "They always say peace is coming. But we are still waiting."

This skepticism about the new peace agreement is buttressed by the frequent and flagrant violation of the last cease-fire agreement, signed in 2004, by the rebels and the government in Darfur, the arid region in western Sudan that has been racked by a brutal ethnic and political conflict since 2003.

Also feeding that skepticism is the fact that only one rebel faction signed the agreement. The leader of that faction is a Zaghawa, a small nomadic tribe, while most people here are Fur, members of the tribe of a rebel leader who did not sign. In Menawashie, sheiks insisted the peace agreement was meaningless without the Fur leader, Abdul Wahid al-Nur.

"If Abdul Wahid doesn't sign, there is no peace," said Omar Muhammad Abakar, the chief sheik of the village.

Between the capitals of North and South Darfur, Menawashie straddles perhaps the deepest fault line in this troubled region. In its latest report on the conflict, the International Crisis Group said this corridor — with its volatile mix of Arab nomads and non-Arab settled tribes, government controlled areas and rebel-held territory — was one of the most violent areas in all of Darfur. North of here, in rebel areas, the violence between rival rebel groups is similarly brutal.

In Menawashie, that violence has taken the form of unceasing attacks by militias aligned with the government, even though Khartoum had agreed to rein in the fighters, village leaders said.

"The Arabs come on horseback and they block the roads," Mr. Abakar said. "They enter our villages at night and steal our animals. They attack us on the roads."

In a makeshift graveyard, Mr. Abakar walked among dozens of mounds, many of them fresh and covered with loose sand and gravel. He pointed out the graves of those most recently killed, including Fatma Yahyah Abdulla Sabeel, the woman killed in the truck attack, and the smaller mounds atop the graves of children who died of disease.

This area is controlled by government troops, so protecting civilians from the attacks of militias is the job of the police, but they seldom respond, village officials said. African Union troops occasionally patrol the area, but their narrow mandate calls for them to monitor, not enforce, the 2004 cease-fire. An officer here, Maj. Essodina Kadangha, said the troops had received no new information about how to proceed now that a peace deal has been signed.

The peace agreement outlines a plan to disarm the Arab militias and the rebel groups, and the United Nations plans to send in a force to replace the African Union one, which has struggled to police this region the size of France with just 7,000 troops, a weak mandate and few resources. Some Sudanese officials have said that the government does not object to a United Nations force now that a peace deal has been signed, but the government has not officially accepted the idea.

In Menawashie, villagers said they were hemmed in by the attacks, trapped and helpless.

"We cannot move even one kilometer from this village," Mr. Abakar said. "Why should it be so? We are suffering."

Despite the danger, Ms. Moussa will soon be back collecting firewood, and back on the road to Shangil Tobayi, where firewood can fetch double the price it commands here, said her mother, Hawa Hissein Amin.

Ms. Amin is unable to walk without a cane because she was shot in the leg by Arab militants when they attacked her village, Hamada, almost two years ago, and she fled here. Her husband was also killed in attack.

"Of course she will have to go," she said of her daughter. "We have no other options. No one can help us."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/wo...ge&oref=slogin


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company