Mick Hartley

Bernard-Henry Levy in Darfur:

The scenario is always the same and echoes the stories told to me–as well as to François Zimeray and the French delegation of Urgence-Darfour–when we talked with the refugees in the Goz Beida camps in Chad a few days ago. The Janjaweed usually come at dawn, hurling flaming torches into the huts. They smash the tall clay jars with their clubs, spilling millet and sorghum onto the ground and then setting fire to it. They scream ferociously as they ride around the flames. They rip babies from their mothers’ arms and toss them into the bonfires. They rape the women, beat them, disembowel them. They round up the men and execute them with machine guns. When finally everything has burned, when all that is left of the village is crumbling, smoking ruins, they round up the terrified animals and drive them toward Sudan.

My witnesses have names. There is Hadja Abdelaziz, 30, with six children, three of whom perished during the attack on the village of Khortial. And Fatmah Moussa Nour, 28, who lost her husband in the bombing of Birmaza last October. But stories like these can be heard in the camps on the other side of the border. What can’t always be gleaned from that distance is the fact that these infernal columns, which Khartoum describes as uncontrollable hordes of bandits, are always under the supervision of officers of the regular Sudanese army. There were Sudanese in Tawila, Rocco tells me, in February of 2004, when 67 were killed, 93 women raped, and more than 5,000 people displaced. There were also Sudanese in Hashaba, which is a little higher up, but there were no deaths because a battallion of the SLA was able to evacuate the civilians. “And, as for Disa–let’s go there, to Disa. You will see with your own eyes.”

Fifteen kilometers to the east, Disa is another village recently razed to the ground. We go there in three trucks. A survivor, whose eyes are dilated in fear, wanders among the charred ruins of his house and tells us how the Janjaweed came twice. Once to destroy the millet granaries, burn the huts and mosque, and kill. They came back the second time to demolish the school. “Both times,” he says, “it was a captain from Khartoum directing the operation. Let the investigators from the international court come here if they want–we’ll give them the evidence!” So, could it be that the Janjaweed, the much-discussed “horsemen of the Apocalypse,” are perhaps just a convenient bogeyman? And could it be that the Janjaweed are really a proxy for the fundamentalist, Islamist, racist Sudan?