Crisis creeps towards catastrophe as village after village is wiped out (The Guardian)
First eyewitness accounts reveal ethnic cleansing spreading from Sudan
Julian Borger in Goz Beida
Monday April 16, 2007
The Guardian
Tagalo, three, sits with his father in a refugee camp, his legs bandaged after the attack that killed his baby brother. Photograph: Julian Borger
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 18 2007
The Oxfam programme manager mentioned in the article below is Pauline Ballaman, not Bellaman. This has been corrected.
Tagalo Hassan had no idea that the horrific violence of Darfur had spread like a stain across the border into Chad and had been creeping towards his village for months.
Being three years old, he could not have understood what was happening when the shooting started before dawn, or when a bullet shattered his right leg and cut a groove in his left.
The attack was carried out by Sudanese Arab horsemen, the feared Janjaweed, and their Chadian allies seeking to oust the government in the capital, N'Djamena. But there was no one on hand to explain any of that to Tagalo. His father had fled, thinking the boy was with his mother and baby brother. The baby was dead, however, and his mother had been crippled in the same hail of bullets. Tagalo was found lying alone by Italian relief workers.
The massacres in Tiero, where Tagalo lived, and the neighbouring village of Marena, near the Sudanese border, killed about 400 people. The numbers are unclear because many of the bodies are still lying in the bush. The killings are a blood-red signal that the culture of mass murder as a weapon of war has found its way to Chad, after four years in Darfur uninterrupted by the global community.
The widening of the conflict threatens, in turn, to trigger a new humanitarian disaster. The shock of the Tiero and Marena attacks sent more than 10,000 villagers from the immediate area fleeing into the bush, bringing to about 140,000 the number of Chadians uprooted by the violence. Many - particularly women and children - died of thirst on the road, having left in too much of a hurry to take water.
Those that survived will have to share the available food aid with quarter of a million Darfuri refugees, and there may not be enough to go round.
Pauline Ballaman, Oxfam's programme manager in the area, described the situation as "catastrophic", with barely two months left before the rainy season makes food delivery impossible.
"Even if the international community gets mobilised to provide the funds to bring in the food, it's going to be a logistical nightmare to get it to the right place at the right time," she said.
Massacres
Oxfam is launching a public appeal today in the race to cope with the crisis, which is growing with every passing day. The massacres at Tiero and Marena took place two weeks ago but there are still stragglers arriving at the relief camps, after days walking in temperatures of 45C (113F).
Now, the survivors are telling the story for the first time, giving some clues as to how the violence is spreading westwards.
"First the Janjaweed came, on horse and on camel, and then the rebels, with heavy arms and vehicles," said Tagalo's father, Hassan Ahmed Abubakar. He was reunited with the wounded boy a few days ago in Goz Beida hospital, a squat concrete block with just a handful of wards for the most urgent cases.
After being bandaged up, Tagalo was consigned to a canvas tent outside, where his father sat fanning the flies from his face. The three-year-old winced and writhed from the discomfort, and cried for his mother, who is in a hospital hundreds of miles away.
Other survivors in Goz Beida and at the camps that have sprung up around the town of Kou Kou 20 miles to the south-east, all agree that the attack came in coordinated waves.
Maki Yacoub Bourma, also from Tiero, said the village's small self-defence force had held off the first Janjaweed attack, but was then overwhelmed when the rebels arrived in military vehicles with heavy weapons, including multiple rocket launchers and jeep-mounted machine guns.
"The Janjaweed came at 5.30 [am]", Mr Bourma said. "The rebels came at eight and by 10 it was over."
The attackers worked their way through the village killing anyone they could see. Mr Bourma's younger brother, Hassan, was shot in the head.
Factions opposed to President Idriss Deby have long been active in the east. Last year, they almost took N'Djamena on the other side of the country.
The people in this part of Chad, the Dajo, refused to join the rebels and so in theory made themselves targets too. But brutality on this scale still came as a shock.
The new bloodlust seems to have been forged from the volatile alliance between the well-equipped rebels and the Janjaweed, who have made scorched earth their trademark in Darfur. Similarly, the villagers say they coexisted peacefully with the local Arab herders for generations until they too were recruited into the Janjaweed militias over the last few years
"The problem is brought from Sudan. Everybody knows it comes from Sudan," Mr Bourma said.
A UN investigation has found substantial evidence that the Sudanese government is supporting the Janjaweed, while the Chadian rebels operate with impunity from inside Sudan. Meanwhile, Khartoum accuses the Deby government of sponsoring a Darfur-based rebellion against its rule.
In short, Tiero and Marena were caught in the middle of a proxy war, exploiting the chronic tensions between farmer and herdsman, African and Arab.
There are no more Arab faces to be seen in the markets of eastern Chad. An Arab encampment by Kou Kou now lies abandoned, after its inhabitants fled in fear of reprisal killings.
Shelter
As the ethnic cleansing gathers pace, their place has been taken by African villagers from Tiero and Marena and other wrecked villages, taking shelter under the thorn trees and the dull silver of UN plastic sheeting.
The aid appeal will help keep them alive but it will not prevent more massacres. The negotiations over a UN protection force have dragged on for months as President Deby and his Sudanese counterpart, Omar al-Bashir, have dragged their heels. The Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy, is also manoeuvring to stop UN troops, fearful they might turn out to be a Trojan horse for western influence. He has sent his own expeditionary force to the region.
The French also have a 1,200-strong garrison in the area, but they have so far done nothing to stop the killing.
There are no shortage of national interests being represented in this chokingly hot, dusty corner of Africa, but none seem interested in stopping the slaughter.
Backstory
The wave of killing in the heart of Africa has its roots in 2003 in Darfur, where ethnic African tribes staged a revolt against Khartoum, after years of neglect and discrimination. In its response, the Sudanese government mobilised and armed Arab herders in raiding parties. The raiders called themselves Janjaweed, which is roughly translated as "devils on horseback". Using rape, pillage and mass murder as weapons of war, the Janjaweed killed 200,000 people, mostly civilians and drove about 2.5 million from their homes and villages. The Janjaweed have now followed the refugees into Chad, and made alliances with anti-government rebels there. Both forces have now started targeting villages that they view as being supporters of the regime in N'Djamena. There is a small African Union force present in Darfur, but it has no mandate to intervene. Negotiations on sending UN peacekeeping forces to Darfur and Chad have met with resistance from both Khartoum and N'Djamena.
Julian Borger in Goz Beida
Monday April 16, 2007
The Guardian
Tagalo, three, sits with his father in a refugee camp, his legs bandaged after the attack that killed his baby brother. Photograph: Julian Borger
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 18 2007
The Oxfam programme manager mentioned in the article below is Pauline Ballaman, not Bellaman. This has been corrected.
Tagalo Hassan had no idea that the horrific violence of Darfur had spread like a stain across the border into Chad and had been creeping towards his village for months.
Being three years old, he could not have understood what was happening when the shooting started before dawn, or when a bullet shattered his right leg and cut a groove in his left.
The attack was carried out by Sudanese Arab horsemen, the feared Janjaweed, and their Chadian allies seeking to oust the government in the capital, N'Djamena. But there was no one on hand to explain any of that to Tagalo. His father had fled, thinking the boy was with his mother and baby brother. The baby was dead, however, and his mother had been crippled in the same hail of bullets. Tagalo was found lying alone by Italian relief workers.
The massacres in Tiero, where Tagalo lived, and the neighbouring village of Marena, near the Sudanese border, killed about 400 people. The numbers are unclear because many of the bodies are still lying in the bush. The killings are a blood-red signal that the culture of mass murder as a weapon of war has found its way to Chad, after four years in Darfur uninterrupted by the global community.
The widening of the conflict threatens, in turn, to trigger a new humanitarian disaster. The shock of the Tiero and Marena attacks sent more than 10,000 villagers from the immediate area fleeing into the bush, bringing to about 140,000 the number of Chadians uprooted by the violence. Many - particularly women and children - died of thirst on the road, having left in too much of a hurry to take water.
Those that survived will have to share the available food aid with quarter of a million Darfuri refugees, and there may not be enough to go round.
Pauline Ballaman, Oxfam's programme manager in the area, described the situation as "catastrophic", with barely two months left before the rainy season makes food delivery impossible.
"Even if the international community gets mobilised to provide the funds to bring in the food, it's going to be a logistical nightmare to get it to the right place at the right time," she said.
Massacres
Oxfam is launching a public appeal today in the race to cope with the crisis, which is growing with every passing day. The massacres at Tiero and Marena took place two weeks ago but there are still stragglers arriving at the relief camps, after days walking in temperatures of 45C (113F).
Now, the survivors are telling the story for the first time, giving some clues as to how the violence is spreading westwards.
"First the Janjaweed came, on horse and on camel, and then the rebels, with heavy arms and vehicles," said Tagalo's father, Hassan Ahmed Abubakar. He was reunited with the wounded boy a few days ago in Goz Beida hospital, a squat concrete block with just a handful of wards for the most urgent cases.
After being bandaged up, Tagalo was consigned to a canvas tent outside, where his father sat fanning the flies from his face. The three-year-old winced and writhed from the discomfort, and cried for his mother, who is in a hospital hundreds of miles away.
Other survivors in Goz Beida and at the camps that have sprung up around the town of Kou Kou 20 miles to the south-east, all agree that the attack came in coordinated waves.
Maki Yacoub Bourma, also from Tiero, said the village's small self-defence force had held off the first Janjaweed attack, but was then overwhelmed when the rebels arrived in military vehicles with heavy weapons, including multiple rocket launchers and jeep-mounted machine guns.
"The Janjaweed came at 5.30 [am]", Mr Bourma said. "The rebels came at eight and by 10 it was over."
The attackers worked their way through the village killing anyone they could see. Mr Bourma's younger brother, Hassan, was shot in the head.
Factions opposed to President Idriss Deby have long been active in the east. Last year, they almost took N'Djamena on the other side of the country.
The people in this part of Chad, the Dajo, refused to join the rebels and so in theory made themselves targets too. But brutality on this scale still came as a shock.
The new bloodlust seems to have been forged from the volatile alliance between the well-equipped rebels and the Janjaweed, who have made scorched earth their trademark in Darfur. Similarly, the villagers say they coexisted peacefully with the local Arab herders for generations until they too were recruited into the Janjaweed militias over the last few years
"The problem is brought from Sudan. Everybody knows it comes from Sudan," Mr Bourma said.
A UN investigation has found substantial evidence that the Sudanese government is supporting the Janjaweed, while the Chadian rebels operate with impunity from inside Sudan. Meanwhile, Khartoum accuses the Deby government of sponsoring a Darfur-based rebellion against its rule.
In short, Tiero and Marena were caught in the middle of a proxy war, exploiting the chronic tensions between farmer and herdsman, African and Arab.
There are no more Arab faces to be seen in the markets of eastern Chad. An Arab encampment by Kou Kou now lies abandoned, after its inhabitants fled in fear of reprisal killings.
Shelter
As the ethnic cleansing gathers pace, their place has been taken by African villagers from Tiero and Marena and other wrecked villages, taking shelter under the thorn trees and the dull silver of UN plastic sheeting.
The aid appeal will help keep them alive but it will not prevent more massacres. The negotiations over a UN protection force have dragged on for months as President Deby and his Sudanese counterpart, Omar al-Bashir, have dragged their heels. The Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy, is also manoeuvring to stop UN troops, fearful they might turn out to be a Trojan horse for western influence. He has sent his own expeditionary force to the region.
The French also have a 1,200-strong garrison in the area, but they have so far done nothing to stop the killing.
There are no shortage of national interests being represented in this chokingly hot, dusty corner of Africa, but none seem interested in stopping the slaughter.
Backstory
The wave of killing in the heart of Africa has its roots in 2003 in Darfur, where ethnic African tribes staged a revolt against Khartoum, after years of neglect and discrimination. In its response, the Sudanese government mobilised and armed Arab herders in raiding parties. The raiders called themselves Janjaweed, which is roughly translated as "devils on horseback". Using rape, pillage and mass murder as weapons of war, the Janjaweed killed 200,000 people, mostly civilians and drove about 2.5 million from their homes and villages. The Janjaweed have now followed the refugees into Chad, and made alliances with anti-government rebels there. Both forces have now started targeting villages that they view as being supporters of the regime in N'Djamena. There is a small African Union force present in Darfur, but it has no mandate to intervene. Negotiations on sending UN peacekeeping forces to Darfur and Chad have met with resistance from both Khartoum and N'Djamena.