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The small United
Nations plane lifts off from N'Djamena,
the capital of Chad, eastward, straight
into the huge African sun, which at this
hour of the morning is already beginning
to scald the barren plains. The
single-engine aircraft gains elevation,
leaving behind the dust-clogged air, the
brown earth and the brutal heat that
glued us to the gray plastic seats with
dirty perspiration. April in Chad, 45
degrees Celsius in the shade; only at
12,500 feet can you breathe.
"Welcome to the flight of the World Food
Program from N'Djamena to Abeche," the
pilot shouts over his shoulder in a
South African accent to the small
passenger cabin, which is populated by a
handful of aid workers, photographer
Uriel Sinai and me. "Flight time: an
hour and a half."
Below us unfolds the Sahel, the desert
south of the Sahara, which stretches in
a belt from the Atlantic coast of
Mauritania in the west to the Nile River
in the east. Only isolated trees grow
here in the dry season. The arid wadis
cross the desert in dark, winding lines.
In the period of Africa's exploitation
by European countries, the Sahel played
a key role. France tried to seize
control of it by creating a series of
colonies from western Africa to the
eastern region, in order to control the
ancient trade routes that lie between
the two ends of the continent.
Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Niger and
Chad - all were French colonies.
In Sudan, the ambitions of the French
collided with those of the British, who
tried to establish a rival axis from
north to south, from Cairo to Cape Town.
The impact of that struggle, and of the
artificial borders forged by the Great
Powers on the soil of Africa in the
Berlin Conference of 1885, are still
visible.
The small Beechcraft banked sharply to
the right and began its descent ahead of
landing in Abeche, the largest city in
eastern Chad. Through the plane window
the city looks like a huge crossword
puzzle: squares upon squares of
one-story houses, surrounded by
fenced-off yards in which a lone tree
casts some shade. Occasionally an
imposing mosque breaks the continuity of
the houses.
Wild West
In 2001, I was told by an Italian aid
worker, there were only two cars in
Abeche. Today there are hundreds. The
city owes this accelerated development
to the confrontation in Darfur. The
dozens of international aid
organizations that have been operating
in eastern Chad in recent years have
made Abeche their base. From here, the
army sets off to do battle with the
rebels hiding in Darfur, less than 200
kilometers away.
Adam, a Chadian in his twenties and the
driver for HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant
Aid Society, a Jewish-American
association that views the provision of
aid to Sudanese refugees in Chad as a
moral imperative to the Jewish people),
received us at the airport with a smile
and a hearty handshake. "Ca va?" he
asked; "Oui, ca va," we replied. French
is the lingua franca here among the
international aid personnel and the
locals they employ. At home they speak
Arabic. "Wait here until they bring your
knapsacks," he said, pointing to a
shaded corner.
In the meantime, we checked out the
small airport: an African hybrid,
combining a humanitarian aid center and
a military base. Three French MiGs,
painted a threatening black, are on the
tarmac; alongside them is a well-armed,
battle-ready Chadian helicopter. In
recent weeks, the fighting between Chad
and the Sudanese army has resumed, and
dozens of soldiers have been killed in
the border region.
Ammunition crates in dark olive-green
were scattered around on the asphalt.
Every so often a noisy military truck or
a jeep packed with Chadian soldiers
arrived in order to load or unload
equipment. In Africa, France is still a
Great Power. France utilizes its
satellites to warn the current president
about rebel convoys that are making
their way toward the capital - when this
promotes its interests in the region.
But if such action is contrary to its
interests, France will support the very
same rebels to depose the president and
install a new one in his place. The
French maintain a base at Abeche - on
the tarmac were a few small,
light-colored French army jeeps,
carrying troops in starched uniforms.
A powerful noise of engines suddenly
fills the airport. The chief of the
local police, the commissar, rushed out
of his office and with his hands
smoothed the short-sleeved black suit he
was wearing. He ran onto the asphalt to
receive those alighting from an immense
U.S. Navy jet that had just landed on
the short runway. The plane was carrying
Deputy Secretary of State John
Negroponte, who had been sent to the
region to persuade Sudan's government to
accept a multinational force in Darfur.
He has come to Abeche to visit one of
the refugee camps of the Darfur
survivors, to see for himself the
deteriorating humanitarian situation.
Our knapsacks arrive on a large wooden
cart; Adam insists on lugging them for
us.
There is a Wild West atmosphere in
Abeche. Everyone who belongs to an
organization or an army is armed and
speeding through the city in SUVs. An
air-conditioned HIAS Land Cruiser drove
us along the sandy streets. Muslim
preachers delivered afternoon sermons in
the local market - a collection of
shade-giving lean-tos where you can buy
anything from ammunition and yellow
jerrycans to clothes. Barefoot children
held out stainless-steel bowls for food
handouts. Every moving vehicle left
clouds of dust in its wake. Improvised
wooden booths sold colored fuel in
bottles: one liter in Bacardi bottles,
two liters in plastic jugs. Huge trucks
that arrived from the desert, with
dozens of people guarding the cargo,
moved ponderously on the roads.
"Here, those are Tora Boro," Adam said,
pointing to an open Jeep in the back of
which a few armed men stood, wrapped in
galabiyas and turbans. They are the
African rebels who started the
confrontation in Darfur. They have a
safe haven in Chad and from here set out
across the border. They have been joined
by many Chadians, who constitute
something like low-paid
government-backed armed militias, and
they top up their official income by
robbing aid organizations and civilians.
Dozens of local people milled around the
well-guarded compound of the UN refugee
agency - a government within a
government, which manages the aid
operation in eastern Chad - checking the
organization's job notices. The UN and
the array of aid groups that are
deployed in guarded compounds across
Abeche are an important economic engine
for the city. They employ hundreds of
residents as guards, cleaners and
drivers as well as logistics, support
and infrastructure personnel. To work
for the organizations is the heart's
desire of the people of Abeche.
We were told by aid workers that the
Chadian authorities are forcing the
organizations to employ relatives of the
local leaders. In the compound
cafeteria, an island of coolness,
sparkling Coke and satellite TV that was
reporting raucously on the presidential
race in France, we met an American
diplomat who is posted in N'Djamena. She
arrived here to accompany Negroponte,
but there was no room for her in the
small plane that took him south. She has
been in Chad for three years and was
counting the days until she is
transferred to Yemen. "Thirty-one days,"
she said with a smile. "I had only one
request for the transfer: I wanted a
place with paved roads."
According to the diplomat, Chad's
Defense Minister, Mahamat Nour, is also
in Abeche and is conducting the fighting
against the rebels. His story is
interesting: last April, Nour was a
rebel himself and led thousands of his
men in a secret convoy from the border
with Sudan to the capital, a trek of
1,000 kilometers, in an attempt to
overthrow Chad's long-serving (17 years)
president, Idriss Deby. On the morning
of April 14 they stormed the capital,
taking Deby's forces completely by
surprise. However, they were unable to
find the presidential palace and had to
ask passersby where the president lived.
The locals told them to look for a large
Colonial mansion across from a tall
building. The rebels mistakenly attacked
a branch of the Libyan Bank. In the wake
of their failure, the army managed to
regroup and block them. Nearly 600
people were killed in half a day of
hostilities. Most of the rebels were
taken captive. Afterward, Deby declared
a peace agreement with the rebel
movement, the F.U.C., and appointed
Mahamat Nour defense minister. "Keep
your friends close and your enemies
closer," the diplomat says, still
smiling.
For a token payment, the UN arranged for
us to stay at Villa Sudan, an isolated
building on Idriss Deby Boulevard. It is
protected by a large metal gate and,
during the day, by a guard equipped with
a truncheon and a walkie-talkie. At
night there are two guards. All the
guards in Chad wear black, a sign that
they sit in the shade most of the day.
From here we organized a trip to the
south. We hired a vehicle and a driver,
stocked up on food and water, arranged
to meet with representatives of the aid
organizations, and tried to find an
efficient interpreter. The candidate we
finally chose was named Havard Hassan,
from the Masalit tribe. He said he was
born in Sudan, went to school in Libya,
and moved to Abeche eight years ago.
"The Jeep leaves here in two days and
meets us in Goz Beida," we told him.
"Can you join it?" "No problem," he said
with a broad smile, his head nodding
from side to side. "You can trust me 100
percent." We traveled to Goz Beida.
Separation and enmity
The conflict in western Sudan, in the
region known as Darfur ("land of the Fur
tribe") simmered for many years below
the surface, until it erupted in a peak
of violence in 2003. Like other
conflicts in Africa, it stemmed from a
combination of intertribal tensions, a
corrupt government that looked after the
interests of the small group it
represented, and a war over natural
resources. Unlike most of the conflicts,
it deteriorated rapidly into what the
United States administration and
international organizations described as
"genocide" against the African
inhabitants.
The confrontation began with a series of
murderous attacks by members of the
African tribes of western Sudan on bases
of the Sudanese government, which they
accused of neglecting the region. In
large measure, this was a replay of the
confrontation that had flared up between
the Christian south and the Muslim north
of Sudan, Africa's largest country. It
generated one of the most lethal civil
wars in the history of the continent,
with three million victims. There was
one difference from the war in the
Christian south: Almost all the
residents of Darfur are Muslims. In
practice, that made absolutely no
difference.
The Arab government of Sudan's
President, Omar al-Bashir, was unable to
cope with the rebel assaults and chose
the same method it had employed against
the Christian south - the use of Arab
militias. Although they share a living
space, language and religion, a
longstanding conflict has existed
between the Arab minority of Darfur -
tribes that were originally Bedouin,
some of which are nomads and others
tillers of the soil - and the African
majority. For hundreds of years, a
separation between the groups was
maintained, along with the enmity.
Throughout this period, Arab merchants
carried out raids against the African
population, taking tens of thousands of
black Africans prisoner and leading them
into the desert to the slave markets of
North Africa.
The Arabs wandered from place to place,
loyal to their tribes and refusing to
accept the authority of the local
rulers. Accordingly, the land belonged
to the African inhabitants through a
ramified system of authorizations called
"hakura." Following a series of severe
droughts at the beginning of the 1990s,
the hostility between the sides erupted
into a war for natural resources. The
spread of the Sahara southward sparked
battles for grazing land and water
wells. The Arabs, who in the dry years
wandered with their camels and their
flocks into the areas of the African
tribes in order to graze their animals
and sell goods, were no longer welcome.
In 2000 they began arming themselves and
seizing control of agricultural lands in
the possession of the Africans.
In 2003, the Khartoum government
exploited the ethnic conflict in Darfur
for its own purpose - to suppress the
African rebels who were attacking
government forces and installations on
the grounds that the government was
discriminating against them in favor of
the Arab inhabitants. The Sudanese
intelligence service, which was assigned
to put down the uprising in Darfur,
recruited some of the leaders of the
Arab tribes and supplied them with
ammunition, vehicles, fuel and
communications means. Thus were the
Janjaweed militias born (a name the
Africans gave to the Arabs who attacked
them, meaning "devil on horseback"). The
Arab leaders made no secret of the fact
that their intention was to "cleanse"
Darfur of Africans. With the direct
encouragement of the government of
Sudan, the murderous attacks began.
In 2003-04, nearly 200,000 people were
murdered - most of them Africans from
the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes - by
the Janjaweed militias and Sudanese
government forces in Darfur. More than
2.5 million people abandoned their
villages and concentrated in large
numbers close to cities or army bases.
Hundreds of thousands fled west into
Chad, where they hoped that the army,
which takes its orders from Deby, who
belongs to the Zaghawa, would stop the
Janjaweed convoys.
The international aid organizations were
quick to act. Their personnel combed
eastern Chad in search of places to
erect refugee camps, and eventually
marked 12 places along the border with
Sudan. The refugees were trucked to the
camps and started to build straw huts in
place of those that were burned in
Darfur, and generally tried to
rehabilitate their lives.
It was on the fringes of one such camp,
in Djabal, that we came across a
5-year-old girl, Jamiya Simar Pap, in a
wretched tent that provided only very
partial protection from the sun. She has
no more than a few months to live.
According to local aid personnel, she is
severely malnourished. Her mother does
not understand what is wrong and seems
to have given up on her. At first, she
says, she took the girl to hospitals in
Sudan, where they had lived before
fleeing. But the wandering and the
poverty have sealed Jama's fate. No one
took responsibilty for caring for her,
and now it is too late.
"What can be done to save her?" I asked
one of our escorts, a local aid worker.
"Not much," he replies. "We will
recommend to the mother that she take
her to the hospital, but I doubt that
they will be able to help her there."
Jama, it turns out, was in a hospital
three months ago, but was discharged
without being given any treatment. No
one was able to explain why.
Around us the camp stretched on a sandy
hill, amid towering, jagged red cliffs.
This is the boundary between the desert
and the more fertile regions to the
south. Some 20,000 Darfur refugees live
here. Thousands of straw huts, their
walls made of reeds bound with brown
tree bark and their pointed roofs
consisting of layers of thick straw, are
organized in well-ordered compounds. We
drove on the sand trails that crisscross
the camp. Clay shards mark the paths
along which SUVs can travel. A few water
towers are scattered in the camp. Along
with the schools, the hospital and a few
stone structures, they illustrate the
absolute dependence of the refugees on
the aid organizations.
But despite the aid, infants are dying
here of hunger and disease. In the
evening, in the guarded compound of one
of the Italian aid groups, Antonio (not
his real name) tried to explain why.
"Although the international
organizations and the UN do not admit
it, aid to the Darfur refugees has been
significantly reduced in the past year.
The refugees have less food, their water
ration has been cut from 15 liters per
person per day to just five, and the
medical aid has worsened," he said.
Dark had already fallen, and Federico
shut down the generator for the night.
Instantly, the sky was strewn with a
million stars. The quiet was broken only
by the Chadian donkeys, which began to
converse between the compounds with loud
braying. "The reasons for the
worsening," he continued, "are a decline
in funding and an increase in the number
of Chadian internally displaced persons,
who compete with the refugees for
international aid."
Like most of the aid personnel, Federico
was cynical. "I have been here two years
already, and I have not been able to
cause any change, any improvement in the
refugees' lives. On the contrary, I see
how the suffering is continuing to
spread and more and more people are
dying." He had two weeks left in Chad
before returning to Italy. Someone told
us that in the past he worked on oil
rigs. "He is trying to atone for his
past through the work here," she said.
A few days later he was given a farewell
party by the few Westerners stationed in
Goz Beida. At dusk, the local workers
spread colorful mats on the ground. The
Italians asked to use our water coolers
for their beer. Evening fell, the sun
lit the dust particles in the air in
red, Chadian music blared out of
punctured loudspeakers. Federico walked
around in a green galabiya, content.
Suddenly a hail of stones struck the
celebrants. A few local youngsters had
climbed the fences and were hurling
large stones with great ferocity. One of
the drivers was hit in the mouth and the
blood dripped onto the sand. Federico
ushered everyone inside and the music
stopped. Stones continued to land
outside. "That's Chad," he said. "We are
not entirely welcome here."
The driver, the interpreter, the
photographer and I sat in the vehicle.
The atmosphere was tense. Minutes before
leaving Goz Beida, we decided to stop at
the market to buy enough diesel fuel for
a few days. Several of the locals milled
around our white Jeep, and some asked
where we were headed. A young Chadian
walked quickly past the vehicle and
shouted "Israeli!" The rumor about two
Israeli journalists wandering around
eastern Chad had apparently spread in
Goz Beida.
The Jeep roared away, leaving in its
wake a vast plume of dust and sand. In
all of Chad, a country twice the size of
France, there are 200 kilometers of
paved roads. All are in the west of the
country, far from where we were. Travel
in these expanses is measured not in
kilometers but in hours. We had more
than an hour of driving left, and the
vehicle shook with every pothole and
listed badly whenever we tried to avoid
sinking into the sand. Nearly all the
windshields in Chad are cracked. The
drivers don't bother to get them fixed
on the unpaved roads. Flying stones are
a commonplace phenomenon. The cracks are
patched up with stickers.
The air outside was dry and burning hot,
but we had to open the windows to air
out the inside of the vehicle. With the
wind came the dust, which enters every
pore of the skin, is sucked into the
nose and penetrates the ears. Sinai was
chain-smoking. His stock of Marlboro
Lites had been rapidly depleted. The
local cigarettes are awful - they
actually hurt the gums.
We were on the way to Goz Amir, another
refugee camp, closer to the Sudan
border. The desert landscape gave way to
a vista of thick bushes and low trees.
Baboons strode the earth, small monkeys
jumped from tree to tree. The forest is
full of trees with red trunks, and a few
camels licked the leaves energetically.
Every so often we passed a herd of lean
cows with sharp horns, the stock of the
African Dajos, who live here. We also
passed convoys of Chadian internal
refugees on donkeys, making their way to
Goz Amer.
We stopped to speak to one of the men,
who was wearing a white skullcap and
riding a small donkey. He told us he had
fled from his village with his family
five days earlier, in fear of the
Janjaweed. "We hope to reach Goz Amir by
evening," he said. "And what awaits you
there?" He had no idea.
"Please write that we need help," he
said. A few children pranced around us
and climbed the trees in an attempt to
set a trap for one of the monkeys, which
did not look particularly perturbed.
They chased it from treetop to treetop,
hoping it would fall to the ground.
"What will you do with it if you catch
it?" we asked. "We just want to play
with it," they replied.
This is the new arena of the conflict,
which has spilled over from Darfur.
Since the end of the rainy season last
November, the area has become a
battleground. More than 50 African
villages have been abandoned in the wake
of Janjaweed attacks and tens of
thousands of people have massed around
Goz Amir. The situation in the camp is
desperate: there is no drinking water
and no food, and no shade. Some of the
refugees have created tents out of
branches and thin cloth.
Humanitarian aid is almost nonexistent,
apart from food distribution once every
45 days. That is not enough. The
internal refugees continue to stream in
every day. Before we arrived, UN sources
said there were 20,000 people in the
camp. A count made while we were there
put the number at 30,000.
Ahmadnil, a local worker for an
international aid organization, took us
on a tour of the camp. He is from the
Zaghawa, the president's tribe, which
gives him a considerable advantage in
dealing with local bodies. We passed two
military trucks. Sinai asked Ahmadnil if
he could photograph them. "No problem,"
he replied with a smile. It turned out
that he went to school with the
commander of the force, Colonel Daud.
The confirmation is given. The 300 or so
soldiers in the trucks presented arms
for the photo. They had returned from
the Sudanese front, where they fought
rebels against the Chad government and
Sudanese forces. We had our picture
taken with the commander and his staff.
One was holding an Israeli-made Galilon
rifle.
Everyone in eastern Chad is now arming.
The Chadian government is sending
truckloads of weapons to the African
Dajos, so that they will fight the
Arabs. Some aid personnel told me that
they are concerned that the Chad
government is trying to exploit the
intertribal conflict for its own ends
and "cleanse" the area of any Arab
presence. The goal, they say, is to
settle the growing Zaghawa tribe here.
On the other side of the border, the
Sudanese Janjaweed are arming their
tribe to fight the Dajos and the
government.
On my flight back to Paris, two-thirds
of the plane was taken up by business
class, justly dubbed "petroleum class."
These are oil times in Chad. Five years
ago, the World Bank began financing an
oil pipeline from the south to the coast
of Cameroon. Deby promised that in
return for funding the pipeline, 80
percent of the oil revenues would be
channeled into health and education.
However, as soon as the oil started to
flow, Deby reneged; he is using the
money to procure arms. In response, the
World Bank froze financial aid to Chad.
Sitting in petroleum class were Western
businessmen and corrupt government
officials and their families. Chad,
along with Bangladesh, is the most
corrupt country in the world, according
to the latest index published by
Transparency International.
In Paris, I wandered among cafes where
Parisians sipped strong coffee before
going to work. The abundance disoriented
me, the beauty of things caught me off
guard. One's thoughts become simple,
almost naive. Curly handwriting on a
blackboard, announcing a restaurant's
daily specials, was juxtaposed in my
mind with the numbers drawn in sand to
teach Sudanese children arithmetic -
they have no blackboards, no paper. Why
is it that in a world where Parisians
can eat breakfast on a pleasant spring
day, Jamiya Simar Pap must lie dying
under the roiling sun? W |
