08/03/2006

Tawilla, Sudan

Mohamed and his family have fled to this refugee camp in north Darfur from their village three times in three years trying to find security, perhaps the most elusive condition in Darfur today. Mohamed is not alone. Many of the two million displaced people in Darfur today have been dislocated more than once. Sitting with a group of men on a barren hill beside the Tawilla camp, the 27-year old teacher demands to tell his story.

In 2004, Mohamed, a member of the Fur tribe (Darfur, the large region in western Sudan means Land of the Fur), fled his village of Dugu after an attack by the Janjaweed militia, a largely Arab group that has destroyed hundreds of villages, often killing men and raping women, in league with Sudanese government forces. Mohamed returned to his village three months later, when the government of Sudan assured him that the village was safe.

The safety lasted until last April 18th, when his village was attacked by a new enemy, a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army led by Minni Minawi, a member of the Zaghawa tribe. The Minawi faction was fighting for territory, both against the government and against another faction of the SLA led by Abdel Wahid, a Fur leader. “I am not part of the SLA,” now split between two African tribes, Mohamed said. But that didn’t protect him or his village. For the second time Mohamed, his wife and three children, aged 9 years to 15 months, walked three hours to find safety in Tawilla. After about three weeks, African Union peacekeepers persuaded Mohamed and others from the village of Dugu that it was safe to return to their village, and they did.

Then on July 6th, the Minawi faction struck again, and Mohamed and his family loaded all they could onto their donkey and returned to Tawilla, a formerly wealthy tobacco growing area about 60 km west of El Fasher, the capital north Darfur. “For me there is no difference between the African Union, the government of Sudan and the Minni Minawi faction,” he says. Many of the other 1,600 people from the abandoned village of Dugu feel the same way.

This is a huge problem in Darfur today, because on May 5th, the government and Minni Minawi signed a peace agreement that is supposed to be monitored by the African Union, yet the agreement has brought increased conflict and displacement. As a result there is widespread distrust of anybody who had anything to do with the agreement. As the Minawi forces attack, “they say those who are not in line with us, we are going to kill them,” says another man in Tawilla, an area that contains 45,000 displaced people now.

The war has meant more than serial displacement for Mohamed. The government of Sudan paid his teacher’s salary but stopped after the war started in 2003. Since then he has lived on contributions of food and money from the parents of his students. That is how he is living today, as a teacher of displaced children in the camp.

He has a ration card that will get him a monthly distribution of food from the World Food Program, but he needs new plastic sheeting to protect him from the seasonal rains, as well as the provision of latrines to help maintain a healthy environment. He lives in a one room straw hut with his family, covered by an old plastic sheet he purchased in the local market; the invading troops took a new plastic sheet he had in his village. There is a cooking hut several feet away and a combined washing/latrine area, surrounded by a flimsy wall of straw near by.

One of Mohamed’s neighbors says that when groups go home, they will need help to re-establish themselves in villages and farms that have been destroyed. “People who are not part of the conflict lost everything, so they need compensation to go home,” he says.

But Mohamed seems to worry less about compensation than security. “If there were security, I would go home today,” Mohamed says. “No problem.” What will produce enough security to enable him to go home? Only the deployment of a large UN peacekeeping force to Darfur, he says.