Darfur fighters defeating governmet of Sudan. is the end near for Khartoum?
Lydia Polgreen, Chad-Sudan border
October 24, 2006
HAROUN Abdullah Kabir stepped from one bloodied corpse to another on the parched battlefield. He searched the soldiers’ decomposing faces for an aquiline nose, fair complexion or fine, straight hair: telltale Arab features.
Instead Kabir, a field commander of the Darfur rebels fighting the Arab-dominated Sudanese Government, found among the fallen only the dark-skinned faces of southern Sudanese and Darfurians. He looked away in disgust.
“You see, they send black men to kill black men,” he said. “We are waiting for them to send Arabs for a real fight.”
This is the new battlefield in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have died, most of hunger and disease, in a campaign of violence many have called genocide.
For the first time in more than two years, rebels fighting the Government for more autonomy are making brazen, successful attacks, declaring void all previous ceasefires.
The most recent peace agreement, signed in May by only one rebel faction and the Government, is in disarray.
Sudan vows to crush the rebellion and, as its military struggles, it will likely turn again to Arab militias called janjaweed to wage its fight.
A visit to the site of the newest fighting revealed a hardening conflict that is taking place along porous borders among some of the least stable countries in Africa, threatening to ignite a wide conflagration.
The Darfur rebels are flush with arms taken in raids and bought in Chad and Eritrea. They say that because Sudan has blocked a UN force from entering Darfur to protect the 2.5 million forced from their homes, they have a duty to stop attacks on non-Arab tribes.
“The international community will not do it,” said rebel field commander General Khatir Toor Khala. “So it is for us to protect the innocent civilians.”
With the two sides heading for all-out war, and millions of displaced people caught in the middle, the people of Darfur and the aid workers trying to help them await the next, seemingly inevitable onslaught.
The prospect of new negotiations has dimmed, and the involvement of Chad and the Central African Republic is spawning a complex, interlinked set of conflicts.
With the rains over, clearing the way for the truck-mounted guns that are the heart of any African ground war, combat has intensified.
The rebel alliance, now known as the National Redemption Front, has inflicted at least two humiliating defeats on the Sudanese army.
One of those battles took place on October 7 in an army camp 20 kilometres north-east of Bahai, a sleepy border outpost in Chad. The camp was strewn with the bodies of dozens of Sudanese soldiers.
Some lay in contorted poses of flight, others were in jumbled heaps in trenches, apparently gunned down in their fighting positions, and at least one soldier appeared to have been killed while still in bed.
Rebel commanders led a reporter and a photographer from The New York Times, to the spot, clearly wanting to trumpet their victory. But they also seemed disappointed that almost all of the dead appeared to be non-Arab recruits.
“The Government sent them here to kill us, but we pity them,” Kabir said. “The janjaweed don’t like to die and make war with us. They are cowards attacking women and children.”
NEW YORK TIMES
