Darfur’s terrible export

07 June 2006

Peter Oborne reports from the battlefield on the Chad–Sudan border where Janjaweed bandits, armed with AK-47s, grenades and helicopter gunships, are ethnically cleansing local African tribesmen

Since last December, with steadily mounting intensity, the Janjaweed have followed the Chadean rebels across the border. They come over mainly in small groups, on horses and camels, armed with automatic weapons and rocket-launchers, murdering and thieving cattle as they go. Some attackers wear Sudanese army khakis. According to Human Rights Watch, whose researchers have displayed great courage and dedication in documenting these incursions into Chad, Sudanese troops and helicopter gunships participate directly in some of these assaults. Human Rights Watch has collected evidence of these devastating air-to-ground assaults against Chadean villages ranging from partly exploded rockets, shrapnel, stabilising fins to handfuls of flechettes — metal darts that are dispersed by anti-personnel ordnance.

We saw the effect of these incursions as we made the drive south from Adre along the lawless Chad/Sudan border. Many of the villages along the route are now deserted. This forlorn area has become a no-man’s-land. Crossing the border into Western Darfur, we found gun casings typically used from helicopter gunships inside villages that had been looted and burnt.

The Janjaweed prey on divisions between local tribes. For this reason victims often know their assailants extremely well. A young herdsman called Hamid — lying in agony in bed with bullet wounds to his leg and anxious to learn if he would walk again — told me how he was attacked a few days earlier: ‘I was looking for my cattle. I found them with my cattle and they shot me in the leg. The person who shot me, I know him all my life, his father and grandfather too.’ His assailants came from the Tama tribe, which had been friendly until it entered into an alliance with the Chadean rebels a few months ago. His own Masalit tribe refused to do so.

Hassan Younis Isac, the leader who had led his Dajo tribesmen into their catastrophic two-day battle, told me the same kind of story. He described how some of his attackers had come from a neighbouring Arab village with which he had been on good terms all his life: ‘We were like brothers. The Arabs were our neighbours and our friends.’