The Tragedy of Sudan
Fifty thousand are dead, and more than 1 million have lost their homes. Time visits Darfur to report on the world's worst humanitarian disaster

The first sound Zahara Abdulkarim heard when she woke that last morning in her village was the drone of warplanes circling overhead. Then came gunshots and screams and the sickening crash of bombs ripping through her neighbors' mud-and-thatch huts, gouging craters into the dry earth. When Abdulkarim, 25, ran outside, she was confronted by two men in military uniform, one wielding a knife, the other a whip.

Two of the intruders, she says, grabbed her and forced her to the ground. With her husband's body a few yards away, the men took turns assaulting her. They called her a dog and a donkey. "This year, there's no God except us," Abdulkarim says they told her. "We are your god now." When they were finished, one of the men drew his knife and slashed deep across Abdulkarim's left thigh, a few inches above her knee. The scar would mark her as a slave, they told her, or brand her like one of their camels.

Darfur is full of stories like Abdulkarim's. Aid workers and human-rights researchers say the violence that has convulsed western Sudan since February 2003, and the ensuing hunger and disease, has killed up to 50,000 people and forced some 1.4 million from their homes. Human-rights groups estimate that thousands more are displaced every week. The vast majority of the atrocities have been carried out by members of the Janjaweed, an ethnically Arab militia of horse-mounted bandits who receive financial and military support from the Sudanese government, which commissioned them to put down an insurgency by the region's non-Arab Muslims.

The United Nations says the pogrom has created the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today. The World Health Organization this summer found that the death rate in Darfur was three times the emergency threshold, with hundreds dying of disease every day and tens of thousands likely to die by the end of the year. But professions of outrage have done nothing to stop the killing. Immediately after labeling the Janjaweed's slaughter genocide, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told lawmakers, "No new action is dictated by this determination"—despite the fact that the international Genocide Convention, signed by the U.S. and 134 other countries, obligates signatories to "prevent and to punish" genocide where it is occurring.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, seems inclined to do even less. Despite the Sudanese government's unwillingness to rein in the Janjaweed, the Bush Administration has so far failed to persuade the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Khartoum. After 18 months of atrocities in Sudan, the international community has yet to take a single punitive action against the Sudanese government.

The conflict in Darfur is literally rooted in the soil. Most of the region's 6 million people are farmers and herders, who cling to the valleys where the soil is less sandy, or nomadic graziers, who migrate between the arid north and the south, which blooms green after the August rains. Though most of Darfur's farmers are African and its nomads Arab, the two groups have mixed easily. Centuries of intermarriage have blurred the most obvious distinctions: nearly all Darfurians are black, Muslim and speak Arabic. Disputes between the two are traditionally settled using a complex network of tribal laws.

Over the past two decades, though, persistent drought has forced the Arabs to move to more arable lands, straining relations with the Africans. In the late 1980s, competition for turf began to turn violent. Light arms poured into the region from neighboring Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leading to occasional massacres. Hostilities simmered for more than a decade. But the spark for war came in April last year, when, following two months of occasional raids on villages, African rebels from a group calling itself the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) swept into the tumbledown airport in the town of al-Fashir, killed 75 Sudanese government soldiers, shot up four military aircraft and kidnapped the air force chief, Major General Ibrahim Bushra. The rebel group claimed that the raid was a protest against both the government's neglect of Darfur and an increasing Arab militancy.

In response, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir called on local tribes to crush the rebellion. The most eager recruits were Arab nomads who saw an opportunity to grab land and livestock through a state-sanctioned military operation. Locals dubbed the fighters Janjaweed, a name that has long been used to describe the region's bandits. By August 2003 the Janjaweed had begun attacking not only the SLA fighters but also Darfurian civilians, who it said were aiding the insurgency. The conflict soon descended into ethnic cleansing, say human-rights observers, with the Janjaweed attacking people on the basis of ethnicity. Darfur's largest Arab tribes refused to take part in the fighting, and many Africans did not support the rebels. But the battle lines had been drawn: Arab against African.

What can be done to save Darfur? The Bush Administration's current strategy is to "calibrate" the pressure on Sudan's government, until it fully disarms the Janjaweed. But human-rights observers who have visited the region say that unless the world moves rapidly to impose economic and military sanctions against Sudan, tens of thousands more could die in a matter of months, either at the hands of the Janjaweed or from starvation and disease. Sudan has agreed to allow the African Union to increase the number of its soldiers and observers in Darfur from 300 to 2,000. But the soldiers' mandate stops them from intervening in the violence, and it would require 50 times as many troops to keep the peace in an area so big. —from TIME, October 4, 2004

Questions

1. What is the Janjaweed?

2. How has the international community responded to the situation in Sudan?