The forgotten Arabs facing destruction

Twenty years ago, the paramount chief of the Um Jalul, Darfur’s most traditional nomads, told a rare foreign visitor how the world of the Abbala, the Arab camel herders of Darfur, was dying. To the north of Sheikh Hilal Mohamed Abdalla’s encampment in the village of Aamo, the desert pastures had bloomed that season for the first time in seven years, ending an 18-month famine that had taken 100,000 lives.

But to the south, as the pressure on resources increased, the settled farmers of the Fur tribe and the Baggara cattlemen of the southern Rizeigat were barring the nomads’ livestock routes and erecting what the nomads called ‘wind fences’ ­— fences that enclosed nothing but wind — to prevent their herds from grazing on previously-shared land.

Sheikh Hilal refused to discuss his kinsmen’s poverty. Change was not a word in his vocabulary. ‘All the Um Jalul posses camels,’ he said. ‘None of us will need to cultivate. Camel nomadism is our way of life.’

A way of life, however, that was fighting for survival even then. An hour’s walk away from Aamo, impoverished nomads whose animals lay dead were scraping away at the stony soil in a desperate attempt to grow enough millet to keep their families alive. The nomads had been the last to receive food aid in the great famine, and suffered terribly.

A displaced camel herder I met in North Darfur early in 2005 remembered the famine year well, even though he was only nine at the time. ‘I used to hear doves singing in the trees,’ he said. ‘When I was older, I realised that everything died that year. It was gone forever.’

Today Sheikh Hilal’s son, Musa Hilal, heads a list of suspected war criminals compiled by the State Department and the failed nomads of North Darfur are the spearhead of the government-backed Janjaweed.

For some, there has been an ideological dimension to the decision to take up arms against the rebels — immersion in the noxious mixture of Islamic fundamentalism and Arab supremacism that is preached by the extremists of the ‘Arab Gathering’, fed by rumours that the rebels aspired to drive all Arabs out of Darfur.

For others, it is simply a livelihood choice, a coping mechanism carried to genocidal extremes. The hard-core Janjaweed get a monthly salary and all the loot they can carry away — animals, household possessions, small arms.

Arabs constitute approximately a third of the population of Darfur. Abbala are a small minority in the areas in which they are present — North and West Darfur — and have always been the most vulnerable, and the most neglected, of Darfur’s many communities. The abhorrent crimes of the Janjaweed have made it convenient to forget that Darfur’s indigenous nomads are themselves victims, driven into the embrace of a government of serial war criminals by drought, desertification and brute poverty.

Abbala have only two members in the National Assembly and have never formed a political force powerful enough to put their needs on anyone’s agenda. The British who ruled Darfur until independence in 1956 assigned almost all of the sedentarized groups in Darfur a dar ­— or tribal homeland— of their own, but left the nomadic groups without.

In peace, the camel-men enjoyed customary rights of passage and pasture in the dars of others. But this war has shattered the symbiotic relationship of farmer and pastoralist, destroying a way of life that environmental change has been squeezing relentlessly for the past twenty years.

Since independence, the level of government services for nomads has been consistently lower than among other communities in Darfur. Government officials chase them to pay livestock tax, but do not provide them even with mobile clinics. Boreholes are remote and insufficient in number. The number of Abbala children going to school has decreased rather than increased.

Today the Abbala are collectively stigmatised for the crimes of the Janjaweed even though most have refused to take up arms alongside the government, more concerned for good relations with their non-Arab neighbours than for an alliance with an uncaring government many hundreds of miles away. Even among humanitarians, there is oftentimes one rule for ‘Africans’ and another for ‘Arabs’.

‘You’d be at coordination meetings and bring up the Arabs and mention how they might be suffering, and a hush would come over the room,’ says a former UN official who calls the Abbala ‘the most pathetic and deprived bunch’ he encountered in Darfur. ‘In rebel areas, schools and health centres are constructed by aid agencies at no cost. But when we visited Arab areas we had to gather leaders together and get them to agree to levy modest taxes on their clans to pay for the health centre or school or whatever. Then we’d provide, for free, medicine or books.’

Journalists too have ignored the suffering of the Abbala, reducing a complex conflict to a simple morality tale of ‘African’ victims against ‘Arab’ Janjaweed. Many papers unquestioningly take their cues from whomever is giving them a lift across Darfur’s difficult terrain. And the people providing the lifts are the UN and the rebels. The same (horribly true) stories about displaced Fur have been running for three years.

‘Three years into the war we know next to nothing about the situation of the nomads,’ says the UN official. ‘And the majority of what we do know comes from the people who are fighting a war against them.’

Some health workers in Darfur believe nomads are the group that has suffered the most during the conflict — not in terms of actual numbers, but as a percentage of their overall population. Their settlements have been destroyed and their herds targeted —by rebels and, albeit less frequently, by Janjaweed. (Since the rebellion began in 2003, as many as 20,000 Abbala camels have been taken by the rebels and sold in Libya, Niger and Chad, according to one informed estimate.) Their traditional migration routes have been cut by conflict, creating a livelihood crisis. The villages, markets and clinics on which they depended along those routes lie abandoned and in ruins.

Abbala children have one of the highest mortality rates in Darfur. Measles, whooping cough, hepatitis E, jaundice and the most virulent form of meningitis, W-135, are all rife in North Darfur, where tens of thousands of nomads are now concentrated in overcrowded settlements.

Yet they seldom seek the services available in the camps for the displaced, unaccustomed to confinement and fearful of being attacked by camp-dwellers who see no difference between them and the Janjaweed who drove them from their villages and prey on their camps.

Absent from the displaced camps, the Abbala are not considered a priority. Unicef and two British NGOs, Oxfam and Tearfund, are possibly the only agencies working with nomads. No-one has researched among the nomads, despite the gravity — and the consistency — of their claims: 40% of their herds lost and 20% of their people dead since the war began because of rebel ambushes, massacres of traveling families, sickness, childbirth.

The Abbala are part of the problem in Darfur, and must be part of the solution. Yet they were not represented at the Darfur peace talks in Abuja where only two armed groups had seats at the negotiating table — the government and the rebel movements. The concerns of the pastoralists were hinted at but not made explicit in the agreement that the government signed on 5 May with the rebel faction that is led by Minni Minawi (a faction so abusive that some Darfurians now call it ‘Janjaweed 2’).

As the non-signatories of the Abuja agreement prepare for new talks with the government, and preparations are made for a Darfur-Darfur dialogue to try to win popular support for the agreement, special attention must be paid to the region’s pastoralists. Unless the international community gains a more subtle understanding of who the Janjaweed are ­— and, more importantly, why — Khartoum will continue to find recruits to its bloody war. ‘All things taken together, the Abbala can be easily manipulated,’ says a senior member of one Abbala tribe. ‘Ignorance is a problem, and when it is coupled with historical neglect and feelings of resentment it can be a time bomb.’

Julie Flint is the author, with Alex de Waal, of Darfur — a Short History of a Long War, published by Zed Books.