Crisis creeps towards catastrophe as village after village is wiped out*

First eyewitness accounts reveal ethnic cleansing spreading from Sudan

Julian Borger in Goz Beida
Monday April 16, 2007
The Guardian

Tagalo Hassan had no idea that the horrific violence of Darfur had
spread like a stain across the border into Chad and had been creeping
towards his village for months.

Being three years old, he could not have understood what was happening
when the shooting started before dawn, or when a bullet shattered his
right leg and cut a groove in his left.

The attack was carried out by Sudanese Arab horsemen, the feared
Janjaweed, and their Chadian allies seeking to oust the government in
the capital, N'Djamena. But there was no one on hand to explain any of
that to Tagalo. His father had fled, thinking the boy was with his
mother and baby brother. The baby was dead, however, and his mother had
been crippled in the same hail of bullets. Tagalo was found lying alone
by Italian relief workers.

The massacres in Tiero, where Tagalo lived, and the neighbouring village
of Marena, near the Sudanese border, killed about 400 people. The
numbers are unclear because many of the bodies are still lying in the
bush. The killings are a blood-red signal that the culture of mass
murder as a weapon of war has found its way to Chad, after four years in
Darfur uninterrupted by the global community.

The widening of the conflict threatens, in turn, to trigger a new
humanitarian disaster. The shock of the Tiero and Marena attacks sent
more than 10,000 villagers from the immediate area fleeing into the
bush, bringing to about 140,000 the number of Chadians uprooted by the
violence. Many - particularly women and children - died of thirst on the
road, having left in too much of a hurry to take water.

Those that survived will have to share the available food aid with
quarter of a million Darfuri refugees, and there may not be enough to go
round.

Pauline Bellaman, Oxfam's programme manager in the area, described the
situation as "catastrophic", with barely two months left before the
rainy season makes food delivery impossible.

"Even if the international community gets mobilised to provide the funds
to bring in the food, it's going to be a logistical nightmare to get it
to the right place at the right time," she said.

Massacres

Oxfam is launching a public appeal today in the race to cope with the
crisis, which is growing with every passing day. The massacres at Tiero
and Marena took place two weeks ago but there are still stragglers
arriving at the relief camps, after days walking in temperatures of 45C
(113F).

Now, the survivors are telling the story for the first time, giving some
clues as to how the violence is spreading westwards.

"First the Janjaweed came, on horse and on camel, and then the rebels,
with heavy arms and vehicles," said Tagalo's father, Hassan Ahmed
Abubakar. He was reunited with the wounded boy a few days ago in Goz
Beida hospital, a squat concrete block with just a handful of wards for
the most urgent cases.

After being bandaged up, Tagalo was consigned to a canvas tent outside,
where his father sat fanning the flies from his face. The three-year-old
winced and writhed from the discomfort, and cried for his mother, who is
in a hospital hundreds of miles away.

Other survivors in Goz Beida and at the camps that have sprung up around
the town of Kou Kou 20 miles to the south-east, all agree that the
attack came in coordinated waves.

Maki Yacoub Bourma, also from Tiero, said the village's small
self-defence force had held off the first Janjaweed attack, but was then
overwhelmed when the rebels arrived in military vehicles with heavy
weapons, including multiple rocket launchers and jeep-mounted machine guns.

"The Janjaweed came at 5.30 [am]", Mr Bourma said. "The rebels came at
eight and by 10 it was over."

The attackers worked their way through the village killing anyone they
could see. Mr Bourma's younger brother, Hassan, was shot in the head.

Factions opposed to President Idriss Deby have long been active in the
east. Last year, they almost took N'Djamena on the other side of the
country.

The people in this part of Chad, the Dajo, refused to join the rebels
and so in theory made themselves targets too. But brutality on this
scale still came as a shock.

The new bloodlust seems to have been forged from the volatile alliance
between the well-equipped rebels and the Janjaweed, who have made
scorched earth their trademark in Darfur. Similarly, the villagers say
they coexisted peacefully with the local Arab herders for generations
until they too were recruited into the Janjaweed militias over the last
few years

"The problem is brought from Sudan. Everybody knows it comes from
Sudan," Mr Bourma said.

A UN investigation has found substantial evidence that the Sudanese
government is supporting the Janjaweed, while the Chadian rebels operate
with impunity from inside Sudan. Meanwhile, Khartoum accuses the Deby
government of sponsoring a Darfur-based rebellion against its rule.

In short, Tiero and Marena were caught in the middle of a proxy war,
exploiting the chronic tensions between farmer and herdsman, African and
Arab.

There are no more Arab faces to be seen in the markets of eastern Chad.
An Arab encampment by Kou Kou now lies abandoned, after its inhabitants
fled in fear of reprisal killings.

Shelter

As the ethnic cleansing gathers pace, their place has been taken by
African villagers from Tiero and Marena and other wrecked villages,
taking shelter under the thorn trees and the dull silver of UN plastic
sheeting.

The aid appeal will help keep them alive but it will not prevent more
massacres. The negotiations over a UN protection force have dragged on
for months as President Deby and his Sudanese counterpart, Omar
al-Bashir, have dragged their heels. The Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy,
is also manoeuvring to stop UN troops, fearful they might turn out to be
a Trojan horse for western influence. He has sent his own expeditionary
force to the region.

The French also have a 1,200-strong garrison in the area, but they have
so far done nothing to stop the killing.

There are no shortage of national interests being represented in this
chokingly hot, dusty corner of Africa, but none seem interested in
stopping the slaughter.

Backstory

The wave of killing in the heart of Africa has its roots in 2003 in
Darfur, where ethnic African tribes staged a revolt against Khartoum,
after years of neglect and discrimination. In its response, the Sudanese
government mobilised and armed Arab herders in raiding parties. The
raiders called themselves Janjaweed, which is roughly translated as
"devils on horseback". Using rape, pillage and mass murder as weapons of
war, the Janjaweed killed 200,000 people, mostly civilians and drove
about 2.5 million from their homes and villages. The Janjaweed have now
followed the refugees into Chad, and made alliances with anti-government
rebels there. Both forces have now started targeting villages that they
view as being supporters of the regime in N'Djamena. There is a small
African Union force present in Darfur, but it has no mandate to
intervene. Negotiations on sending UN peacekeeping forces to Darfur and
Chad have met with resistance from both Khartoum and N'Djamena.