desert society continues. While the killing and displacement reached their peak in 2004 and have declined since, the Antonov still flies. The situation is perhaps more complex as, in addition to state-sponsored violence, the Darfuri rebel groups have begun to turn on each other and unity is further away than ever. But Darfur remains a marginalised part of North Sudan—still governed by a military elite and underpinned by a profoundly racist ideology. Despite ICC indictments Bashir remains in charge, uncensured by other African leaders and in control in a capital still booming from oil revenues. Aid agencies remain on the ground providing vital supplies for the nearly four million people who have been displaced, but this task is routinely made almost impossible by the regime’s total lack of cooperation and is still overseen by the ICC-indicted Humanitarian Aid Commission. Peace for Darfuris—as for other minorities within this ideologised rump state of North Sudan—remains as elusive as ever. And what has been lost, apart from hundreds of thousands of lives, is a society whose fusion of Arab and African cultures representing East and West, Saharan and sub-Saharan, animist and Muslim, may well be impossible to restore. As another old sheikh lamented, a few days from his own eightieth birthday:
The Arabs came here looking for pasture, and when the grass was finished they went back. They used up our grass, but they took good care of the gardens and the people. There were no robberies, no thieves, no revolution. No one thought of domination, everyone was safe … Now there is nothing but trouble all over Sudan. There is no government, no control. Look around you. What do you see? No women, only armed men. We no longer recognize it, this land of ours. 3
For Orwell, history notionally ended in the 1930s with the defeat of Republican Spain. Seventy years later, a history of pluralism and relatively peaceful accommodation has ended in Darfur in a parallel world of extremist ideologies and the inhuman calculus of political power.
1 quoted in J Flint & A de Waal, Darfur: A New History of a Long War , Zed Books, London, 2008.
2 A de Waal, ‘Counter-insurgency on the cheap’, London Review of Books 26 (15), August 2004.
3 Sheikh Heri Rahma quoted in J Flint & A de Waal, Darfur: A New History of a Long War , Zed Books, London, 2008, p. 276.
IT IS STRANGE, the rituals that we find ourselves carrying out before the unknown—detached acts, learned by rote, and made solemn by the occasion. I shaved not once but three times, showered twice, arranged my books first by content, then by colour, then by size. I put on the cleanest of clean clothes—a red shirt, blue trousers, grey desert boots—and stepped out of my dark concrete room onto the street and into the dust of El Fasher.
Outside our compound we were engaged in silent activity, making final preparations for the mission. Conversation was pared back to what was strictly necessary—all the more lucid and eloquent for its truncated, listlike form: ballistics blanket, full medical kit, small medical kit, run bag, 180 litres of petrol, camp beds, water, food, fire extinguishers, sat phone, HF radio, VHF radio, radio call-sign list, travel authorisation, GPS, white and blue flags. Body bags were stored under the back seat of the Toyota Land Cruiser Troop Carrier—a large and highly prized car known throughout Darfur for its speed, agility and long desert range. A car used by aid workers and coveted by killers. Take off the roof, attach a machine gun and you have a ‘technical’—a makeshift instrument of war capable of striking deep into the continent. We called it the Buffalo, and with its dual fuel tanks, power and relatively light weight, it could cover 1000 kilometres without refuelling. With this car, the chance of attack and hijacking increased, and we had four of them and 100 kilometres of sand, scrub and stone before us—a lawless area known as the Janjaweed Damra.
The Arabs came here looking for pasture, and when the grass was finished they went back. They used up our grass, but they took good care of the gardens and the people. There were no robberies, no thieves, no revolution. No one thought of domination, everyone was safe … Now there is nothing but trouble all over Sudan. There is no government, no control. Look around you. What do you see? No women, only armed men. We no longer recognize it, this land of ours. 3
For Orwell, history notionally ended in the 1930s with the defeat of Republican Spain. Seventy years later, a history of pluralism and relatively peaceful accommodation has ended in Darfur in a parallel world of extremist ideologies and the inhuman calculus of political power.
1 quoted in J Flint & A de Waal, Darfur: A New History of a Long War , Zed Books, London, 2008.
2 A de Waal, ‘Counter-insurgency on the cheap’, London Review of Books 26 (15), August 2004.
3 Sheikh Heri Rahma quoted in J Flint & A de Waal, Darfur: A New History of a Long War , Zed Books, London, 2008, p. 276.
IT IS STRANGE, the rituals that we find ourselves carrying out before the unknown—detached acts, learned by rote, and made solemn by the occasion. I shaved not once but three times, showered twice, arranged my books first by content, then by colour, then by size. I put on the cleanest of clean clothes—a red shirt, blue trousers, grey desert boots—and stepped out of my dark concrete room onto the street and into the dust of El Fasher.
Outside our compound we were engaged in silent activity, making final preparations for the mission. Conversation was pared back to what was strictly necessary—all the more lucid and eloquent for its truncated, listlike form: ballistics blanket, full medical kit, small medical kit, run bag, 180 litres of petrol, camp beds, water, food, fire extinguishers, sat phone, HF radio, VHF radio, radio call-sign list, travel authorisation, GPS, white and blue flags. Body bags were stored under the back seat of the Toyota Land Cruiser Troop Carrier—a large and highly prized car known throughout Darfur for its speed, agility and long desert range. A car used by aid workers and coveted by killers. Take off the roof, attach a machine gun and you have a ‘technical’—a makeshift instrument of war capable of striking deep into the continent. We called it the Buffalo, and with its dual fuel tanks, power and relatively light weight, it could cover 1000 kilometres without refuelling. With this car, the chance of attack and hijacking increased, and we had four of them and 100 kilometres of sand, scrub and stone before us—a lawless area known as the Janjaweed Damra.
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