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WORLD
POLICY JOURNAL
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Volume XXII, No 5, Spring 2005 |
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Ceasefire, Sudan Style
A Photographic Essay on Darfur
Brian Steidle*
The world finds ready reasons for averting
its eyes from the grisly realities in Sudan’s Darfur
region, where thousands continue to be slaughtered during
a phantom “ceasefire.” A distracted America is elsewhere
preoccupied, an inward-looking Europe lacks the resolve to
act, and an impoverished Africa, beset by a dozen conflicts,
has neither the funds nor the capacity to do more than monitor
the ongoing massacres in Darfur—which continue, even
as Sudan has finally this year ended its decades-long war
with the non-Islamic south.
It thus serves many interests to know as little
as decently possible about Darfur in western Sudan, where
war, hunger, and pestilence stalk an estimated 1.5 million
people. A fourth of the region’s inhabitants have been
driven from their homes, either by government forces or their
allied irregular militia, the Janjaweed (the name is said
to mean “devil on a horse”). The war pits the Arab-led
Khartoum regime against a largely African but also Muslim
population consisting of settled farmers and nomadic herders.
It needs adding that Sudan’s 35 million people are divided
into 19 major Arab and African ethnic groups, meaning tribal
rivalries and a profusion of languages invariably complicates
disputes in a country poor in traditions of tolerance. There
are rarely neat fault lines. In Darfur, for example, the Sudanese
Liberation Army brings together Darfur’s Islamists and
secular rebels in opposing Khartoum’s forces and its
militias.
Washington has creditably joined in pressing
the United Nations Security Council to exhort Sudan to halt
the killings. But three council resolutions adopted in the
past year have signally failed to abate the bloodletting.
Following a forthright report by a U.N. commission of inquiry
detailing genocidal crimes, the council is at press time weighing
yet another hortatory resolution lacking real teeth. With
that in mind, it is our privilege to publish this graphic
essay by an American whose unsettling duty it was to monitor
the sham ceasefire. He here explains his purpose. —The
Editors
My name is Brian Steidle. I grew up living
around the world as the son of an American naval officer,
now a retired admiral. This included two years in the Philippines,
which greatly influenced my desire to work on a global scale
helping the less fortunate. I graduated with a B.S. from Virginia
Polytechnic Institute in 1999 and received a commission in
the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer. I completed
my service at the end of 2003 as a captain. In January 2004,
I accepted a contract position with the Joint Military Commission
in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan facilitating the North-South
ceasefire preceding the recent peace treaty. Within seven
months I worked my way up from a team leader to senior operations
officer.
I was then invited to serve in Darfur as an
unarmed military observer and U.S. representative with the
African Union (AU). I was one of three Americans serving with
a coalition of African countries monitoring the ceasefire
between the two African rebel groups and the government of
Sudan. I was armed only with a pen and camera; my reports
were my ammunition. Our mission was to report on the violations
of the ceasefire agreement, including attacks on villages,
troop movements, and military operations. While conducting
these investigations, we observed torched villages, hundreds
of thousands of displaced civilians, and the effects of such
violent atrocities as the rape of women, the torture of men,
and the murder of children.
My conscience would no longer allow me to stand
by without taking further action, and I became convinced that
I could be more effective by bringing the story of what I
witnessed to the world. I am now working with my sister, Gretchen
Steidle Wallace, founder of Global Grassroots, a nonprofit
organization, to lead a social movement to raise public awareness
about the atrocities in Sudan and seek international support
for the African Union in stopping the violence.
The three most important points that I implore
the wider world to consider are (1) that the atrocities resulting
in millions displaced and hundreds of thousands killed are
ongoing and must be addressed urgently before thousands more
die; (2) that these crimes against humanity result from a
government-sponsored military operation that is systematically
eliminating the black African population from all of Darfur;
(3) that this conflict can be resolved through weapons sanctions,
a no-fly zone throughout Darfur, and greater international
support for an expanded mandate for the African Union.
Darfur: The Violence Continues
My military observer team was made up of representatives from
the two rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and
the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), and the government
of Sudan, a Chadian mediator, a team leader and assistant
team leaders from the member countries of the African Union,
and either a European Union or U.S. representative. Every
day we would investigate violations of the ceasefire agreement,
including attacks by any parties to the agreement or military
troop movements not approved by the AU.
Day after day, we saw villages of up to 20,000
inhabitants burned to the ground, with nothing left of them
but the ash outlines of charred homes and fences. In my team’s
area of operation, which was southern Darfur, I estimate that
nearly 75 percent of the villages had been decimated as of
the beginning of February. We saw scores of dead bodies with
evidence of torture—arms bound, males castrated, children
beaten to death, body parts removed— and execution-style
killing. In the village of Um Louta, which was destroyed in
early November 2004, we found evidence that many of the 37
people who had been killed had been locked in their huts and
burned alive. We interviewed women who had been gang raped.
I received one report that cited around 70 rapes in refugee
camps over a period of a few days.
Women and children bear the greatest burden
of this conflict. The internally displaced persons (IDP) camps
are filled with families that have lost their fathers. When
women venture out of the camps in search of firewood and water,
they face the almost certain risk of being raped. Men who
leave the camps face castration and death. So the families
decide that rape is the lesser evil. Nor have the children
been spared; many are missing. When women are finally able
to return to their villages, they may have to support themselves
alone. Many rape victims are ostracized and others face unwanted
pregnancies.
This February apparently saw a decrease in
overall violence in Darfur. However, last December and this
past January were among the most violent months of the entire
conflict, following a similar lull in November. I do not believe
the current relative calm is necessarily an indication that
the conflict is ending.
A Government-Sponsored Military Operation
I have evidence that the atrocities committed
in Darfur are the direct result of a Sudanese government military
operation in collaboration with the Janjaweed militias. Government
forces and Arab militias regularly attack a village together.
Helicopter gunships support the Arab militias on the ground.
Before these attacks occur, the cellphone systems are shut
down by the government so that villagers cannot warn each
other. Most of the time, the gunships fire antipersonnel rockets.
These rockets contain flashettes, or small nails with a stabilizing
fin on the back. Each gunship contains 4 rocket pods, each
rocket pod contains about 20 rockets, and each rocket contains
about 500 of these flashettes. Flashettes are used only to
kill or maim people on the ground. Flashette wounds look like
shotgun wounds. One small child I saw looked as if his back
had been shredded. We got him to a hospital, but we did not
expect him to live.
On many occasions when we attempted to investigate
one of these attacks, we would find that fuel for our helicopters
was unavailable. There were many explanations from the Sudanese
supplier, from "We are out of fuel" to "Our
fuel pumps are broken." However, government gunships
continued to fly.
Villagers who were able to escape alive flocked
to IDP camps, where they would scrounge for sticks and plastic
bags to construct shelters from the sun and wind. But more
misery awaited the refugees. The government would first announce
the need to relocate a particular camp and assess its population,
often grossly underestimating the number of refugees. A new
camp would be built by the international aid organizations,
and then the government would forcibly relocate refugees,
leaving hundreds or thousands without shelter. Then the government
would bulldoze and burn the vacated camps.
The difference between the government and the
rebel groups is that, in the majority of cases, the latter
forces target military and police positions, while the government
targets civilians. The rebels attack to aquire ammunition,
weapons, and logistical stores, and to show the government
that they are still a force to be reckoned with. I believe
that one of the purposes of the government attacks is to kill
as many African tribespeople as possible and drive the rest
from Darfur.
In mid-December 2004, I was standing next to
a brigadier general in the Sudanese army on the outskirts
of the village of Labado, population approximately 20,000.
The village had just been attacked, and to our knowledge,
most people had been driven out or killed. The Janjaweed,
who had attacked the village in the company of government
forces, were still in the village shooting their weapons,
burning huts, and looting. I asked the general— whose
orders were to "protect the civilian populations and
open the roads for commercial traffic"—why he would
not stop the attacks. He replied that the Janjaweed were not
his troops and he did not have control over them. And yet
I saw truckloads of his men, in uniform, coming from behind
his military position, traveling into the village to loot
and burn huts in front of our eyes.
What Can We Do?
I believe this conflict can be resolved through international
pressure on Khartoum and support of the African Union. More
specifically, I believe weapons sanctions and a no-fly zone
throughout Darfur are critical. I have witnessed the effectiveness
of the African Union and believe it can stop the conflict
if it gets more support. For example, after the attack on
Labado, the government general told us that his mission was
to continue clearing the route all the way to Khartoum, several
hundred kilometers away. The next village in line was Muhajeryia,
possibly twice the size of Labado. When I arrived in Darfur,
just three months earlier, the Sudanese Liberation Army controlled
probably 75 percent of the territory. At this point, Muhajeryia
was one of only two or three SLA strongholds left in southern
Darfur. The African Union was able to place 35 soldiers in
Muhajeryia. Their mission was not to protect the village,
but to protect the civilian contractors establishing a base
camp for future deployment. But this was enough to deter the
government forces and the Janjaweed from attacking. That respite
enabled the AU to deploy 70 more soldiers from the protection
force and ten military observers in Labado. Within one week,
approximately 3,000 people returned to rebuild their homes
there. Soon afterward, the AU was able to negotiate the withdrawal
of government troops from the area.
People at the grassroots level worldwide have
the power individually to help stop the killing. It is critical
for individuals to contact their government leaders and ask
them to take action. Speak out and tell others of the atrocities.
If we do this, we might be able to stop a genocide in the
making.
To view the photographic essay, please download
the PDF version of the article. (Note: the file is 35
MB, so it may take a long time to download.)
*Brian Steidle was a senior operations officer
with the Joint Military Commission in the Nuba Mountains of
southern Sudan and an unarmed military observer and U.S. representative
with the African Union monitoring the ceasefire in Darfur
between rebel groups and the government of Sudan
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