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Lost in maze of fact and fiction in Darfur

By Manish Chand, IANS

El-Fasher, North Darfur (Sudan) : Flying from the Sudanese capital Khartoum to the mineral-rich western province of Darfur, often in the news for vicious fratricidal violence, is like travelling into another country and time zone. A vast sprawling desert glints in the merciless sun, blurring the thin dividing line between fact and fiction.

All the noise and bustle of a burgeoning metropolis recedes. An eerie silence envelops your senses, teasing questions that no one has straight answers to. When are the janjaweeds – the infamous horse and camel-mounted militia slaughtering innocents that populate contemporary folklore about Darfur – going to come? You wait and wait, but all you see are some refugee camps and the soporific hum of a North African small town sucked into a timeless limbo.

The contrast between Khartoum and Darfur, a region that is larger in size than France and is embroiled in savage feuding among nomads and farmers competing for scarce land and water, gets accentuated as you drive around on rain-splashed muddy roads in El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

Typical small town sights roll by: hawkers selling cheap food, bright-eyed children playing in fields, and locals swapping gossip and drinking tea. You can’t distinguish easily between Arabs and Africans (Darfur’s six million people are affiliated to 30-odd tribes most of whom are Sunni Muslims) and you don’t notice bloodlust in their eyes either.

But the languid small town look that El-Fasher sports is deceptive. Behind that placid surface lurks tales of dehumanising violence and mass displacement. Neglected for decades first by the British and then the powers-that-be in Khartoum, rebels in Darfur started a fight for a better deal for indigenous people four years ago with some rebel factions demanding a separate state.

A visit to the Abu Shoack camp for internally displaced people shakes one out of torpor induced by the desert heat. Nearly 54,000 people, who fled intra-tribal violence about four years ago, are living in this camp, which is being managed by a coalition of NGOs, UN agencies like the World Food Programme and Unicef with assistance from the Sudan government.

Women and children, inured to the wrenching pain of displacement, peer blankly from their little enclosures and think their visitors are from one of the aid agencies.

Ibrahim al-Khalil, the camp manager, says they are being looked after well, and some of them are even living a better life than the one they were used to before the mayhem struck. After all, they get their fixed quota of ration, water, daily necessities and an allowance to boot.

But the bland security of the camp has not diminished their longing for the homes they left behind. “The big problem in Darfur is land. They want to go back to their land,” said Khalil, his voice bleached of all emotion.

Land, water and home: primal needs breed primal conflict. This picture of deprivation changes when one reaches the stately white mansion of Mohammed Usman Yusuf Kibir, the governor of North Darfur, which is located close to the garrison of the Sudanese armed forces.

As innocent-eyed gazelles gambol casually in the lush lawns of the governor’s house, the powerful wali (governor) of North Darfur turns on his PR charm. He brushes aside “all the BBC-CNN talk” of genocide and “state-abetted janjaweed ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs” and fixes us with a hard look.

“It’s basically a battle for land and water. When nomads’ animals stray into farmers’ lands, fighting starts,” he says.

“It’s not an Arab versus non-Arab fight. The security has improved and people are returning. I am not saying we don’t have problems. But these are mostly individual crime cases of robbery and kidnapping,” said the tall, dark and imposing governor as he jabs his fingers in the air and vehemently contests the figures of the dead and the displaced in the Darfur conflict that is bandied around in the West.

There are many casualty estimates, with the UN saying that the conflict has left as many as 450,000 dead from violence and disease since the crisis erupted four years ago. Most NGOs put the number of the dead at between 200,000 and 400,000 and internally displaced people at 2.5 million people.

“It can’t be more than 50,000 dead, including those who died from disease, and internally displaced persons are a little over 100,000,” says Kibir, attributing the exaggeration that has made the US descry genocide in Darfur to a larger American conspiracy “to convert Sudan into another Iraq”.

“It’s not killings, but… It’s oil,” he utters after a long pregnant pause. “We also have uranium. American companies want access to Sudan’s oil, which we have denied. That’s why the sanctions,” the governor said, echoing a popular conspiracy theory in Khartoum.

Sudan has so far managed to survive the decade-old US sanctions with more than a little help from China, the largest investor in Sudan’s booming oil industry, with total bilateral trade exceeding $10 billion.

The enterprising man he is, the governor points to a group of well-fed Lebanese investors waiting to meet him and dreams aloud of hotels and supermarkets and other infrastructure that will come up in Darfur, which has no direct road link to Khartoum yet.

These mall dreams may, however, have to wait for peace to return to the region. Negotiations are to begin next month between the government and those rebels who did not sign the Darfur Peace Agreement last year in Tanzania.

People here are hoping that the hybrid United Nations-African Union Force, comprising 26,000-odd troops, likely to be deployed in Darfur over the next year could do the trick. But it’s a hope that can as easily sink into desert sands and turn out to be a mirage.

(Manish Chand can be contacted at [email protected])