A Voice from the Camps: A Displaced Resident of Darfur Tells His Story
August 22, 2004
Offset against the stark white linen of his turban and jellavia, the wrinkles at the edges of Abaker Ismail Jacub’s brown eyes tell in part the story of how he came to arrive at the Riyad camp. Though it is only a four-hour walk from his village to the western Sudanese town of El Geneina, you sense that he arrived here a different man than when he left the village that night in January.
“Our village was attacked by [men on] horses, cars and planes,” Abaker explained of the day the janjaweed militia and Sudanese government soldiers attacked his village of Umbere. “The helicopters came and went, came and went. Seven people were killed. We hid in the garden until darkness came, then we fled.”
I met Abaker in Darfur through my work with Catholic Relief Services, which has pledged $5 million dollars to assist those in western Sudan affected by what the United Nations calls the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in the world today. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced within Darfur since early 2003, when fighting between Sudanese government troops, rebel soldiers opposing them, and a group of Arab militia known as the janjaweed erupted across the three states that comprise Darfur.
Stories by those like Abaker who have been affected by the fighting are remarkably similar in detail. Many villagers report weeks and months of harassment by janjaweed militia, who most believe have been trained and armed by the Sudanese government. Many describe beatings at the hands of militia members and widespread theft of cattle and other livestock, a serious threat to food security in a region where livestock represent one of the few forms of wealth for impoverished rural families. When the militia finally attacked the village, Abaker said, most had few possessions remaining and little or no time to flee with what they did possess.
“We were unable to take anything,” Abaker explained. “They had already taken the animals.”
Most, like Abaker, fled to larger towns and villages like El Geneina, where they hoped to be safe from further attacks. Here, they crowd informal settlements like the Riyad camp in which Abaker lives with his family – a camp of 22,000 people scattered over a largely treeless expanse of ground on the northern edge of El Geneina town. Most live in hand-made shelters known as kuzis – thatch structures identical to those which Darfurians construct in their own villages. Others live in small shelters made of grass and reeds and covered, for those lucky enough as yet to receive any distributions from aid agencies, with plastic tarps, vital protection against that heavy rains now falling here. But few have yet received such assistance.
The humanitarian response to the crisis unfolding in Darfur is proving as complicated as the roots of the conflict which gave rise to the mass population movements there. The largest country in Africa – roughly equal in size to the entire continental United States east of the Mississippi river – Sudan is impoverished and extremely under developed. There are only 40 miles of paved road in the entire country – all of them in the capital city of Khartoum, making travel on the dirt roads of Darfur extremely difficult. The heavy rains of the rainy season, which usually extends from June to September in this region, have further complicated the problems faced by agencies trying to reach displaced populations inside of Sudan. The World Food Program, the United Nations agency tasked with providing food for the displaced of Darfur, met only 37% of it’s targeted objectives in July, and projections are that the August distributions will also fall far short of 100% coverage.
Because most in Darfur have not fled far from their homes – usually within a few hours’ walk – many have been able to find support from friends and relatives living nearby. Many of those on the outskirts of El Geneina have been able to find work in and around the town, cooking, cleaning, cutting firewood and collecting grass for use in construction. The money they earn is used to buy food and other necessary goods.
But the assistance many are receiving is also causing problems for host families, who, through sharing their own resources with typically large families of friends and relatives, have made themselves more vulnerable and less food secure. The United Nations estimates that in addition to the 1.2 million people who have been displaced internally, 800,000 more people have thus been affected by the conflict and will require food and other relief items in the coming year, bringing to more than two million those in Darfur directly affected by the crisis. An estimated 200,000 more who fled the fighting are now living in Chad as well.
Further compounding the problem is the issue of registration of internally displaced people. With so many people living so close to larger towns like El Geneina, the populations of the town mix freely with the camp residents, causing serious problems for aid agencies trying to accurately register those who are in fact displaced and in need of emergency assistance. Residents of the camp complain that many are not registered, and are thus not entitled to collect aid, while aid agencies struggle to identify those who are truly displaced to ensure that available resources are effectively targeted. With more villagers still arriving at some camps, accurate totals are extremely difficult to judge.
For the camp residents like Abaker, who has been living in Riyad for seven months now, there are few certainties. Rising in unison from the daily chorus of need, however, is one familiar strain for the displaced populations of Darfur and the refugee populations of eastern Chad. Home, they say, remains only a dream until security across the region stabilizes.
“We feel safer here than in our villagers,” Abaker explained to the nods of the camp residents gathered around him. “When we feel safe there we will return.”
