The Arabs Are Victims, Too
By Julie Flint
The Washington Post
November 19, 2006

In the fourth year of the war in Sudan's Darfur region, tens of thousands of Arab nomads are barely clinging to life in the ravaged valley that extends north from the central Jebel Marra massif. Their settlements have been destroyed and their herds targeted. Their traditional migration routes have been cut. The villages, markets and clinics on which they depended lie abandoned and in ruins.

Their children have one of the highest mortality rates in Darfur. Measles, whooping cough, hepatitis E, jaundice and the most virulent form of meningitis, W135 -- rural Darfur has them all. There are small, everyday tragedies, too, repeated in almost every community: In one impoverished nomad settlement, nine young people died in collapsing hand-dug wells over the course of only three weeks. Their deaths, like those of all other nomad children in this war, went unremarked.

The Abbala, the camel nomads of North Darfur, have always been the most vulnerable, the most neglected, of the region's many communities. So it is no coincidence that the hard core of today's Janjaweed militias -- the Sudanese government's predominantly Arab proxies in the war against rebel troops -- come from their ranks. The abhorrent crimes of the Janjaweed -- rape, pillage, murder -- have made it easy to forget that Darfur's indigenous nomads are themselves victims, driven into the embrace of a government of serial war criminals by drought, desertification and brute poverty.

The incurious reporting that has reduced the war to a simple morality tale, an African "Lord of the Rings," equates Janjaweed with Arab, and especially Abbala. But only a minority of Darfur's 300,000 or so Abbala have joined the 20,000 to 30,000 Janjaweed. Most have refused to contribute soldiers, well aware that good relations with their non-Arab neighbors are more important than an alliance with an uncaring government hundreds of miles away.

Yet they have been collectively stigmatized for the crimes of the Janjaweed and their suffering has been ignored. Few journalists have written about them, or listened to them -- myself included.

We know next to nothing about the situation of the nomads despite the gravity -- and the consistency -- of their claims: that since the war began, 40 percent of their herds have been lost and 20 percent of their people have died because of rebel ambushes, massacres and sickness. Most of what we do know comes from the people fighting them.

Arabs constitute about a third of the population of Darfur. The Abbala, however, are a small minority in the areas in which they are present -- North and West Darfur. They have only two members in the 450-member National Assembly and have never formed a political force powerful enough to put their needs on anyone's agenda, even though the discrimination against them dates back more than a century. The British who ruled Darfur until independence in 1956 assigned almost all of the settled groups in the region a dar -- or tribal homeland -- of their own, but left the nomadic groups without. In peace, the camel herders enjoyed customary rights of passage and pasture in the dars of others. But this war has shattered that symbiotic relationship, snuffing out a way of life that environmental change had already been squeezing relentlessly for the past 20 years.

In 1985, Sheik Hilal Mohamed Abdalla, the paramount chief of the Um Jalul clan, the most traditional of the camel-herding tribes of North Darfur, explained to a rare foreign visitor -- my colleague Alex de Waal -- how the world of the camel men was dying. To the north of Sheik Hilal's encampment in the stony village of Aamo, the lush jizu desert pastures had bloomed for the first time in seven years, ending an 18-month famine that had taken 100,000 lives in the region. But to the south, as the pressure on resources increased, Baggara cattlemen and the settled farmers of the Fur tribe were barring the nomads' migratory routes and erecting what the nomads called "wind fences" -- enclosing nothing but wind -- to prevent their herds from grazing on previously shared land.

The proud old sheik refused to discuss his kinsmen's poverty. Change was not admissible. "All the Um Jalul possess camels," he said. "None of us will need to cultivate. Camel nomadism is our way of life."

A way of life, however, that was fighting for survival even then. An hour's walk from Aamo, destitute nomads whose animals lay dead scraped away at infertile soil in a desperate attempt to grow enough millet to keep their families alive. The nomads had been the last to receive food aid in the great famine, and suffered terribly. A displaced camel herder I met in 2005 remembered the famine year well, even though he was only 9 at the time. "I used to hear doves singing in the trees," he said. "When I was older, I realized that everything died that year, was gone forever."

Today Sheik Hilal's son, Musa Hilal, is first on a State Department list of suspected war criminals, and the failed nomads of North Darfur spearhead his forces. For some, there is an ideological dimension to the decision to take up arms against the rebels -- immersion in the noxious mixture of Islamic fundamentalism and Arab supremacy that is preached by the extremists of the Arab Gathering. For others, it is a livelihood choice -- a coping mechanism carried to genocidal extremes.

Some health workers in Darfur believe that nomads have suffered more than any other group during the conflict -- not in actual numbers, but as a percentage of their overall population. Yet nomads, unaccustomed to confinement and fearful of being attacked, seldom seek the services available in camps for the displaced. Absent from those camps, they are not considered a priority. Even among humanitarians, there is one rule for them and another for those at the sharp end of the government's war.

"In rebel areas, schools and health centers are constructed by aid agencies at no cost," a former U.N. official told me. "But when we visited Arab areas we had to gather leaders together and get them to agree to levy modest taxes on their clans to pay for the health center or school or whatever. Then we'd provide, for free, medicine or books."

Relief workers who voice their concerns to the U.N. leadership meet with blank stares -- and silence. "We'd bring up the Arabs and mention how they might be suffering and a hush would come over the room," said an aid worker based in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. "A few months ago, I asked U.N. human rights monitors how many cases of abuse by rebels against Arabs they'd heard of. They said they'd never investigated a single incident of violence against Arabs."

The African Union force in Darfur is equally unaware of, and equally unresponsive to, the plight of the nomads. A U.N. officer who visited the AU base in Kebkabiya, North Darfur, was told by the base commander that he had seen no nomads on his tour of duty. The U.N. man was dumbstruck.

"Over three trips in this area we had found about 10 nomad settlements with about 40,000 Arabs," he recalled. "They told us the entire valley was full of displaced. The commander has been there for months, smack in the middle of a quasi-Arab homeland."

The historic disregard for the plight of Darfur's pastoralists was reflected in peace talks that the AU sponsored in Abuja, Nigeria, earlier this year. Only two groups had seats at the negotiating table: the government and the rebel movements. The concerns of the pastoralists were hinted at in the peace agreement signed on May 5 by the government and the faction of the Sudan Liberation Army that is led by Minni Minnawi -- a faction so abusive that many Darfurians now call it "Janjaweed 2" -- but they were never made explicit.

"Minni is virulently anti-Abbala, a mirror image of the Janjaweed if you like," one of the Abuja negotiators told me. "He was always the stumbling block in any attempts to talk about regulating nomadic routes, or the phased disarmament of the Janjaweed. He just wanted them completely eliminated."

Six months after the Darfur agreement was signed, peace is more elusive than ever. It will continue to be so, and Khartoum will continue to find recruits for its bloody war, unless the international community gains a more subtle understanding of who -- and, even more important, why -- the Janjaweed are, and moves in a serious fashion to include the much-maligned camel men in the developmental and political processes that alone can bring peace and heal Darfur's wounds.

Julie Flint is coauthor of "Darfur: A Short History of a Long War" (Zed Books).  She can be reached at flintjulie@onetel.com.

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Updated November 28, 2006