A Darfur Village Bears Up Under Janjaweed Yoke

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 24, 2007

KUTERI, Sudan -- The men with rifles lounged on a carpet in the sand. The five of them had come to the village that morning from the crumble of mountains nearby, and now the afternoon sun was blasting. Some sipped tea.

Since arriving four years ago in a herd of horses and camels and guns, the militiamen known as Janjaweed have killed several of the 500 people who live here, villagers said, beaten others and generally menaced the population into believing that their village could be destroyed at any moment, like hundreds of others across the Darfur region of western Sudan.

Now their unwilling host, Ibrahim Ahmed, greeted the men with smiles, a friendliness that dissolved into a grave whisper once he was inside his hut.

"We told them, 'This is your home, and you can come anytime,' " said Ahmed, the local sheik, explaining that he and his people had decided four years ago to remain in their village even if it meant embracing their tormentors.

"They beat us, but we treat them like family," added his friend Abdulmalik Ismail. "In our minds, we hate them."

The story of Kuteri is in many ways emblematic of a conflict that is slipping from crisis into a more chronic state of dysfunction.

Now in its fifth year, a military campaign by the Sudanese government to crush a rebel movement in Darfur has almost completely reordered the region's demographics. The conflict is complex but comes down to one in which the government has armed and supported certain nomadic Arab tribesmen against the region's farming villagers, who are predominantly black Africans.

At least 450,000 people have died from disease and violence in the conflict, and more than 2.5 million -- around half the area's entire population -- have fled to vast displacement camps whose numbers continue to swell.

Yet there remains a relatively small number of farming villages such as Kuteri where people are struggling to maintain dignity under the yoke of the government-backed Arab militiamen, who eat their food, drink their water and lounge under the spare shade of low, twisted trees.

"We think that here, we are freer," Ahmed said. "We are better than we would be in the camps."

His village of mud-walled huts and straw fences sits along a sweep of rolling desert scattered with thorn bushes, fallow grass and fists of purple flowers. The nearest town is Abata, where Arab militias occasionally race their horses through the streets.

An hour away are the ruins of two villages and the town of Zalingei, a Janjaweed stronghold where battered Land Cruisers, the battlewagon of choice in Darfur, are repaired in a local market. A militia training camp is nearby, according to African Union officials, and local residents say the entire area falls under the notorious command of Musa Hilal, whom human rights groups accuse of war crimes.

"There is no security," said Ismail, who is 37 and has 10 children.

The village is surrounded, and the atmosphere is tense; the militiamen seemed easily provoked by the presence of journalists.

Since the Janjaweed came in early 2003, some families have fled Kuteri for what seemed like the relative safety of the camps, but others could not or did not want to leave. Ahmed's elderly father refused to abandon the village where farmers from the Fur tribe, from which Darfur takes its name, have cultivated the land for 70 years. Ismail's father was too frail to make the trip, perhaps two days long, through the sand and the sun. Women stayed because their husbands did. And there were other considerations.

"In Islam, it says that you defend your dignity," Ismail said. "Here we have land. Here we have family. Here we have a house. We have these things to keep us."

When they arrived, the Arab militiamen -- from nomadic tribes that had grazed their cows in the area but, with government guns, had become the enemy -- arrested Ahmed, beat him and handcuffed his wrists so tightly they are encircled with scars.

"They asked questions like: 'Do you know any rebels in this village? Do you know these people? Tell me exactly who helped them,' " he said.

The militiamen would leave at night and come back during the day. In all, they have killed 10 men from the village and raped 15 women, according to Ahmed, the sheik. They pillaged homes, let their camels eat the crops of beans, corn and tomatoes, and at other times, just sat with their weapons.

Over time, the sheik said, the villagers attempted to appease their captors, first with protection money, then with food, and even with their own beds, until a kind of uneasy rapport developed, governed by certain rules. Half the crops were for the villagers; half were for the militiamen. Meals had to be shared, lest the militiamen suspect they were being poisoned. Conversation had to be personal, yet not too direct.

"You just talk in a nice way, like a child's way," Ismail said. "If you say anything wrong, they will kill you immediately."

"It's hard for grown men like us to act like children," said Ahmed, who has three wives and 21 children. "But we have old men and children in this village, and we need to protect them."

It was early afternoon, and as Ahmed and Ismail walked out of the hut, their demeanor changed from grave to cheerful in the presence of the militiamen sitting in the sand.

According to a failing peace agreement reached last year between the government and one Darfur rebel group, the militiamen were supposed to be disarmed. But Ahmed said the men now wearing government uniforms and driving trucks are the same ones who at first came in civilian clothes, riding camels and horses. The villagers know them by name.

The sheik walked along the sand paths of the village he once governed, tapping a thin stick along the walls in a listless, regal gesture. He pointed toward the valley, where a woman fetching water was raped last month, he said. He pointed toward a distant mountain where one of the ever-fragmenting Darfur rebel groups is based.

"I never see them," Ahmed said, "because the government controls this place, and they cannot let them enter."

Even as humanitarian organizations remain focused on helping the millions of displaced people, there is growing concern that some of the vast camps encircling towns in Darfur are becoming semi-permanent settlements of people dependent on aid and increasingly alienated from village life.

In many camps, people have begun to build mud-brick homes, fences, gardens and other structures in a sign that they are settling in for a long stay. There have also been reports of youth gangs forming in the camps and other quasi-urban problems developing, aid workers said.

In that context, a few relief groups are attempting to help people who have expressed a desire to stay in their villages.

In the area around Kuteri, the International Committee of the Red Cross has distributed food and seeds, and last week it repaired a broken well in the village. Though last year's harvest was decent, Ahmed said he remains concerned that villagers will run out of food.

He has heard about a U.N. proposal to send in a peacekeeping force, a plan he supports in theory but fears in reality: He is afraid, he said, that if the troops come, the militiamen will start killing everyone in his village.

So far, about 50 families from Kuteri, including those of Ahmed's four brothers, have packed their bags, loaded their donkeys and headed for a camp near Zalingei. And one day last week, another few families -- totaling about 30 people -- decided they had finally had enough of making nice with militiamen and wondering whether they would have enough food tomorrow.

In a scene repeated perhaps millions of times across Darfur, the families went house to house in the early morning, saying goodbye to their friends and relatives, who gave them cooking oil, soap and food to help them get through the first few days in the camp.

"All the families leaving are feeling sad," Ismail said. "We tell them to go stay in the camp, and if you don't like it, then you can come back."

But not one family has returned, except for occasional visits, he said, and the village's population is dwindling. Even the sheik sometimes entertains the notion of leaving.

"At the camps, they give you food, clothes, water," he said. "Here, we have nothing. . . . But I like my house. I can't change my house for another place. I like my home, my land, my people. I can't change."