Darfur’s terrible export

10 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

A proxy war is now under way in Eastern Chad. On the side of the Sudanese government are the Janjaweed and the Chadean rebels, who are ethnically cleansing thousands of square miles to the east of the country. Ranged against them are the forces of the official Chadean army, such as it is, and the SLA. Areas of Chad are now under Janjaweed control. It is a common sight to pass on the road little groups of villagers heading away from the border in search of some kind of security.

They will not find it. The camps where they end up are vulnerable and unprotected. Claire Bourgeois, the senior United Nations official in Eastern Chad, warns there is a heavy risk that the camps will be attacked by the Janjaweed, repeating the pattern of atrocity that has already occurred inside Darfur — a threat made worse, she says, because the SLA uses the camps as recruitment centres. She is pressing for a well-armed and effective protection force inside Chad, but so far without success.

The Darfur conflict has its roots in ancient tensions between nomadic Arabs and pastoral Africans. For centuries they coexisted, but a series of factors — the expansion south of the Sahara desert, the growing difficulty of the nomadic way of life, demographic change, the easy availability of the gun — have all introduced frictions about land and resources. What made this cocktail utterly poisonous was the emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of a militant Arab ideology. ‘You are informed that directives have been issued,’ read one instruction from the headquarters of the Janjaweed leader, Musa Hilal, ‘to change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.’ Hilal’s father was an avuncular old sheikh who once hunted lion with Wilfred Thesiger: one of the very last representatives of a timeless way of life. His son comes from the same nomadic tradition, but it is now horribly mutated. Musa Hilal is a war criminal comparable to Milosevic or Himmler.

Hilal’s achievement has been to help create and sustain a murderous Arab methodology. Armed with modern weapons and animated by a land hunger that never existed before, the Janjaweed have already consumed Darfur and are moving west. Ordinary African tribes, who have no common cause or means of resistance, do not yet have the beginnings of an answer.

Peter Oborne and Robin Barnwell’s film Into the Death Zone will be shown on Channel 4 at 7.35 pm on Friday 9 June.