KHARTOUM, July 26 (Reuters) - U.N. and African Union Darfur envoys should unite rebel field commanders to avoid infighting and chaos before any peace deal is signed to end the bloodshed, a senior rebel member said on Thursday.
Suleiman Jamous, the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) humanitarian coordinator, added rebel political leaders who lived outside Sudan's war-torn west should hurry to achieve peace and not forget the millions of civilians suffering because of the revolt.
U.N. Darfur envoy Jan Eliasson and his AU counterpart Salim Ahmed Salim hope to unite rebel factions and agree on a negotiating position and venue in a meeting in Tanzania in August. But Jamous said any deal would be worthless if field commanders were not on board.
"It is better to work towards unity for the SLA at least before ending the peace talks with any sort of agreement," he told Reuters by telephone from a U.N. hospital in South Kordofan, a region that neighbours Darfur.
"It can work simultaneously with the efforts towards the negotiating table but the unification should end before a peace deal is signed."
Dozens of field commanders control the ground in Darfur and have often expressed differences with their political leadership outside the region, who they say do not consult them enough.
During previous talks, the disconnect between the political leaders negotiating and the commanders on the ground hindered discussions on security arrangements because clashes continued.
After a peace deal signed by only one of three rebel negotiating factions last year, the rebels fragmented with infighting between signatories and non-signatories.
SUFFERING
Jamous warned this would repeat itself if there was no field unity conference.
Jar el-Neby, a senior SLA field commander, also wants U.N. and AU support for unity talks before the meeting in Tanzania.
Previous unity meetings have been spoiled as political leaders outside the region did not attend.
"We should neglect our personal agendas for the agenda of the conflict and how to solve it for the sake of the civilians suffering for our years," Jamous added.
"They need to think of the future of Darfur after the peace -- how we can keep our community together with the killing we created."
Jamous has been virtually imprisoned in the U.N. hospital for 13 months after he was rescued from Darfur in need of urgent medical treatment. Khartoum calls him a "terrorist" and says he will be arrested if he leaves the hospital.
However, he is still in telephone contact with commanders and said if were released he could help unite the field.
Jamous said any new peace talks needed to address the weaknesses of last year's deal, which included the disarmament and reintegration of the Janjaweed militias, mobilised by the government and accused of rape, murder and looting.
"Any kind of presence of armed men in undisciplined ranks is the cause of this conflict and the failure of any peace deal," he said.
He said the international community needed to guarantee the implementation of any agreement, especially dismantling the militias. A U.N.-AU joint force under discussion could play that role.
Jamous coordinated access for the world's largest humanitarian operation to hundreds of thousands in need of aid during the conflict. His work earned him the respect of many groups and kept rebel looting of aid convoys to a minimum.
Experts estimate 200,000 have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms accusing central government of neglect in early 2003.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Growing concern for safety of Sudan opposition leader in custody
Thursday 26 July 2007 06:55.
By Wasil Ali
July 25, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — Supporters of an opposition party in Sudan expressed concern over the well being of their top leaders arrested by security services two weeks ago amid allegations of torture.
Mubarak al-Fadil
Sudanese security services arrested Mubarak al-Fadil, leader of the Umma Reform and Renewal opposition party and his deputy over allegations of planning sabotage actions in the country.
A statement issued by Al-Fadil office slammed the government for not allowing his family and attorney to visit him in prison.
According to the statement three requests have been made to the authorities requesting permission to visit Al-Fadil but that they have received no response as of yet. Several members of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) sought to assist Al-Fadil’s family in securing a visit but were turned down as well.
Sudan banned all media reporting on the case of 17 people accused of trying to overthrow the government.
The government issued a decree establishing a commission to investigate the allegations against Al-Fadil and the other detainees.
However the statement from Al-Fadil’s office claim that a member of the commission informed his attorney that he has not been formally notified by the government to proceed with the investigation.
Sudan’s announcement of thwarting the coup attempt was received with skepticism due to the vague nature of the plot.
Former Sudanese Prime Minister and leader of the opposition Umma party Sadiq al-Mahdi told Sudan Tribune that “this is the fifth time we hear from the government about an alleged coup attempt through the years that turns out to be nothing”.
Al-Mahdi noted that in each of these instances the Sudanese government talks about “incriminating evidence and stocks of weapons found but no details are provided”.
Sudanese officials made contradictory statements regarding the nature of the plot and the extent of foreign involvement.
Sudan said Al-Fadil smuggled weapons into the capital Khartoum in preparation for a coup.
But Sudan’s presidential adviser Nafi Ali Nafi admitted to reporters later that no weapons have been found in association with the alleged plot.
Initially Sudanese authorities accused Al-Fadil of being the mastermind of a sabotage plot in Khartoum and said that he sought support from Libya and the US.
But then Sudanese officials denied any foreign involvement and upgraded charges against Al-Fadil to a full blown coup attempt and said that political assassinations was part of the plot.
Al-Fadil’s supporters speaking to Sudan Tribune said they received information that Al-Fadil and the former Minister of Tourism, Abdel Jelil al-Basha were subject to torture and verbal abuse by security services.
“They [Sudan’s Security services] wanted to force a televised confession from him [Al-Fadil] but he refused so they resorted to torture which left marks on his body. This is why they have not allowed any visits” said one supporter who spoke on condition of anonymity.
However there was no independent confirmation of these allegations.
Al-Fadil was appointed as a presidential adviser for economic affairs in 2002 but was sacked after making contacts with the United States without Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir’s consent.
(ST)
By Wasil Ali
July 25, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — Supporters of an opposition party in Sudan expressed concern over the well being of their top leaders arrested by security services two weeks ago amid allegations of torture.
Mubarak al-Fadil
Sudanese security services arrested Mubarak al-Fadil, leader of the Umma Reform and Renewal opposition party and his deputy over allegations of planning sabotage actions in the country.
A statement issued by Al-Fadil office slammed the government for not allowing his family and attorney to visit him in prison.
According to the statement three requests have been made to the authorities requesting permission to visit Al-Fadil but that they have received no response as of yet. Several members of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) sought to assist Al-Fadil’s family in securing a visit but were turned down as well.
Sudan banned all media reporting on the case of 17 people accused of trying to overthrow the government.
The government issued a decree establishing a commission to investigate the allegations against Al-Fadil and the other detainees.
However the statement from Al-Fadil’s office claim that a member of the commission informed his attorney that he has not been formally notified by the government to proceed with the investigation.
Sudan’s announcement of thwarting the coup attempt was received with skepticism due to the vague nature of the plot.
Former Sudanese Prime Minister and leader of the opposition Umma party Sadiq al-Mahdi told Sudan Tribune that “this is the fifth time we hear from the government about an alleged coup attempt through the years that turns out to be nothing”.
Al-Mahdi noted that in each of these instances the Sudanese government talks about “incriminating evidence and stocks of weapons found but no details are provided”.
Sudanese officials made contradictory statements regarding the nature of the plot and the extent of foreign involvement.
Sudan said Al-Fadil smuggled weapons into the capital Khartoum in preparation for a coup.
But Sudan’s presidential adviser Nafi Ali Nafi admitted to reporters later that no weapons have been found in association with the alleged plot.
Initially Sudanese authorities accused Al-Fadil of being the mastermind of a sabotage plot in Khartoum and said that he sought support from Libya and the US.
But then Sudanese officials denied any foreign involvement and upgraded charges against Al-Fadil to a full blown coup attempt and said that political assassinations was part of the plot.
Al-Fadil’s supporters speaking to Sudan Tribune said they received information that Al-Fadil and the former Minister of Tourism, Abdel Jelil al-Basha were subject to torture and verbal abuse by security services.
“They [Sudan’s Security services] wanted to force a televised confession from him [Al-Fadil] but he refused so they resorted to torture which left marks on his body. This is why they have not allowed any visits” said one supporter who spoke on condition of anonymity.
However there was no independent confirmation of these allegations.
Al-Fadil was appointed as a presidential adviser for economic affairs in 2002 but was sacked after making contacts with the United States without Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir’s consent.
(ST)
16 people killed as tribal clashes erupt in Darfur
Thursday 26 July 2007 06:15.
July 25, 2007 (AL-FASHER) — At least 16 people were killed and 20 wounded in a clash between rival Arab tribes in the war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan, local authorities said on Wednesday.
Rzigat Aballa tribesmen fell on a band of Torjum nomads in South Darfur province killing nine, the authorities told reporters, without specifying what day the clash took place.
The tribes, at odds over grazing rights and livestock raiding, have violated a February truce seven times, most dramatically in April when Rzigat tribesmen killed 62 Torjam in their villages.
Darfur came to world attention in 2003 when rebels took up arms against the government to protest at their region’s marginalisation.
The government combatted the rebellion with camel-riding Janjaweed militia, many from the Rzigat Aballa tribe, who have since been accused of atrocities and genocide.
International aid organisations are struggling to address the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, but have been impeded by the widespread violence.
"In the past two weeks, nine food convoys have been attacked by gunmen across Darfur," said Kenro Oshidari, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) Sudan representative.
"WFP staff and contractors are being stopped at gunpoint, dragged out of their vehicles and robbed with alarming frequency," he said, adding that 18 food convoys have been attacked this year, with six vehicles stolen.
Ten WFP staff have been either detained or abducted.
The attacks have prompted the United Nations to declare the road between Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and Kass town, where fighting between Torjam and Rzigat Aballa has taken place, a "no-go" zone for staff.
WFP’s operation in Darfur feeds two million people a month.
About 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in the Darfur conflict, according to UN estimates. Some sources say the death toll is much higher.
(AFP)
July 25, 2007 (AL-FASHER) — At least 16 people were killed and 20 wounded in a clash between rival Arab tribes in the war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan, local authorities said on Wednesday.
Rzigat Aballa tribesmen fell on a band of Torjum nomads in South Darfur province killing nine, the authorities told reporters, without specifying what day the clash took place.
The tribes, at odds over grazing rights and livestock raiding, have violated a February truce seven times, most dramatically in April when Rzigat tribesmen killed 62 Torjam in their villages.
Darfur came to world attention in 2003 when rebels took up arms against the government to protest at their region’s marginalisation.
The government combatted the rebellion with camel-riding Janjaweed militia, many from the Rzigat Aballa tribe, who have since been accused of atrocities and genocide.
International aid organisations are struggling to address the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, but have been impeded by the widespread violence.
"In the past two weeks, nine food convoys have been attacked by gunmen across Darfur," said Kenro Oshidari, the World Food Programme’s (WFP) Sudan representative.
"WFP staff and contractors are being stopped at gunpoint, dragged out of their vehicles and robbed with alarming frequency," he said, adding that 18 food convoys have been attacked this year, with six vehicles stolen.
Ten WFP staff have been either detained or abducted.
The attacks have prompted the United Nations to declare the road between Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and Kass town, where fighting between Torjam and Rzigat Aballa has taken place, a "no-go" zone for staff.
WFP’s operation in Darfur feeds two million people a month.
About 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in the Darfur conflict, according to UN estimates. Some sources say the death toll is much higher.
(AFP)
Monday, July 23, 2007
Life and Death in Darfur
By Dr. Jill John-Kall
Photo by: Bethany Morehouse
Dr. Jill John-Kall cradling a
young TB patient
Today I arrived in Mujkar, one of our remotest sites in West Darfur. I dumped my gear and went directly to the clinic where I joined one of my colleagues and his team. I always look forward to my field trips because I am extremely proud of our staff. Their hard work and dedication are the backbone of all our programs and without them, innumerable lives would be lost.
The observation room was filled with little patients. The first girl I saw was a 24 month old who was dying of malnutrition. Looking at the way she was breathing and the way she would lapse in and out of “sleep” without even the strength to close her eyes fully, a sense of foreboding slowly crept over me. I tried to reassure her mother that in the morning we could try to transfer her to the nearest hospital, which is four hours away, but in the meantime we could feed her through a naso-gastric tube. I almost believed it myself.
While I started saying a little prayer for her, we were called to see a pregnant woman whose high blood pressure led to convulsions. While we struggled to give her medicine and stabilize her, a staff member came to tell us that the little girl was crashing. My colleague ran to resuscitate her while I stayed with the pregnant woman. In a few minutes he came back, having succeeded in reviving her. Of course, I think we both knew that it was just a matter of time.
After stabilizing the pregnant woman and reassuring her family, we were asked to see a three year old boy that had fallen from a great height. Upon seeing the child, my heart froze – here was a child with a history of a fall, who was limp and “sleeping” in his mother’s arms, taking very shallow breaths. Immediately, we tried to wake the baby. I just needed to hear him cry. I pinched him cruelly while the other doctor applied sternal pressure. He continued silently mocking us. I pinched harder and asked for a needle to give him a little jab. Luckily, he started crying. We were all relieved for a few moments until we realized how shallow his breaths still were. We listened to his lungs and they were tight, lots of wheezing with very minimal air moving. I ran to the office where I had left my inhaler. We improvised making a chamber out of a small plastic medicine bag and having the baby inhale the medicine. The problem was that his heart was already racing trying to cope with the work he was putting in with each breath and if I gave him too much of the inhaler, his heart would race even further pushing him right over the edge. After giving him some antibiotics and steroids, we left him with his mother, hoping for the best. As I type this now, I am waiting for someone to come and tell us that he died. Deep in my heart, I know he won’t last long, not with the way he was breathing…
Photo by: Dr. Jill John-Kall
A baby in the therapeutic feeding center in Darfur
As I stood there in the clinic watching the little boy, I thought that I wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone on the world, the notion that after seeing a child, you just wait for the bad news. The feeling that as you lay your hands on a child, listen to him breathe, watch his eyes and listen to his heart, you leave him in God’s hands because you know deep inside, that he will not live long. My thoughts are interrupted as the nurse comes to tell us that the little girl with malnutrition has died. The family is distraught, I weakly say to the mother “malesh, malesh-sorry, sorry.” I feel like the lowliest creature on earth. What an inadequate statement to make, “sorry, sorry.” Am I sorry that she lost her child or am I sorry that we didn’t save her? Is my “sorry” in empathy for her or is it asking forgiveness for me? As I hold the crying mother, I can feel her tears on my arms. And then we are called to see the little boy.
He is worse, trying desperately to breathe through his little lungs which are smothered with invisible invaders. I know that he too will not make it and it is unbearable. I am wrestling with my own demons. As a doctor, my hands should be healing hands. My mind should be able to come up with some answers, something to attack the vile bacteria who have invaded his body. An asthmatic myself, I have a soft spot for anyone who can’t breathe and he is no exception. I give him some more of my inhaler and silently beg him to get better. We leave him in the observation room and I head back to the office. It’s 7:15 p.m.
As I start working in the office, I look at pictures of Um Dukum, where I was about two weeks ago. If it’s possible to imagine, Um Dukum is a place even further away than Mukjar, bordering Chad and Central African Republic. I’m looking at these pictures for work but subconsciously, I’m looking at them to remind myself why I’m here in the first place. We have recently taken over a little rural hospital there and it will soon be a beautiful program. It’s currently a little shack of a hospital, give or take 20 beds with a primary health care component. We do outpatient consultations, immunizations, reproductive health, health education, nutrition surveillance and outreach work. I am in love with this little shack of a hospital. It’s amazing how many lives are saved there and how many more will be saved. Women get emergency C-sections, conflict victims get sewn together, children get measles vaccines and we even treat the common cold. This is such an important location because it not only serves the local population but it also serves the IDPs within Darfur as well as the refugees that come in from Chad and CAR in times of their internal conflicts.
This hospital is a Godsend for people in this area because referrals to the nearest hospital – another four hours away – are almost impossible. Any travelers by road are frequent victims of hijackings and theft and in the rainy season, the dirt roads become rivers of mud, impossible to cross. But even though the hospital is simple, it is a shining example of how minimal efforts can go a long way in the midst of Darfur. My mind drifts back to Mukjar. Last year referrals were much easier because the roads were safer. However, since December, more and more aid agencies have been targeted by bandits, hijackers, Janjaweed, government troops, rebels, all part and parcel of any relief team working in Darfur.
Photo by: Bethany Morehouse
An IMC staffer schooling a villager at a new clinic in West Darfur on some basic tenets of primary health care. Initiatives like this one help maintain Dr. John-Kall’s hope that she can make a difference in the lives of people struggling to stay alive in Darfur.
It’s almost 8 p.m. and I’ve just been told that the little boy has died. Inside, I am screaming curses while outside I remain calm since it was expected anyway. My eyes start to water and I can’t see the keyboard anymore. It’s hard when you lose a patient, even harder when they’re kids and today we lost two. I think about the inconsolable families, left with huge voids in their hearts. I think about those little kids who will never see tomorrow. I start questioning myself and what I thought I could ever achieve here. In the midst of this self loathing, self hating mood, the realist in me shouts “I told you so!” The cynic in me shouts “I told you so!” The optimist in me is quiet. I am uncomfortable because I worry that I am slowly losing my soul. I glance over to my pictures of Um Dukum. The optimist whispers, “You can still try.”
Dr. Jill John-Kall serves as Medical Director for International Medical Corps in Darfur, Sudan.
Photo by: Bethany Morehouse
Dr. Jill John-Kall cradling a
young TB patient
Today I arrived in Mujkar, one of our remotest sites in West Darfur. I dumped my gear and went directly to the clinic where I joined one of my colleagues and his team. I always look forward to my field trips because I am extremely proud of our staff. Their hard work and dedication are the backbone of all our programs and without them, innumerable lives would be lost.
The observation room was filled with little patients. The first girl I saw was a 24 month old who was dying of malnutrition. Looking at the way she was breathing and the way she would lapse in and out of “sleep” without even the strength to close her eyes fully, a sense of foreboding slowly crept over me. I tried to reassure her mother that in the morning we could try to transfer her to the nearest hospital, which is four hours away, but in the meantime we could feed her through a naso-gastric tube. I almost believed it myself.
While I started saying a little prayer for her, we were called to see a pregnant woman whose high blood pressure led to convulsions. While we struggled to give her medicine and stabilize her, a staff member came to tell us that the little girl was crashing. My colleague ran to resuscitate her while I stayed with the pregnant woman. In a few minutes he came back, having succeeded in reviving her. Of course, I think we both knew that it was just a matter of time.
After stabilizing the pregnant woman and reassuring her family, we were asked to see a three year old boy that had fallen from a great height. Upon seeing the child, my heart froze – here was a child with a history of a fall, who was limp and “sleeping” in his mother’s arms, taking very shallow breaths. Immediately, we tried to wake the baby. I just needed to hear him cry. I pinched him cruelly while the other doctor applied sternal pressure. He continued silently mocking us. I pinched harder and asked for a needle to give him a little jab. Luckily, he started crying. We were all relieved for a few moments until we realized how shallow his breaths still were. We listened to his lungs and they were tight, lots of wheezing with very minimal air moving. I ran to the office where I had left my inhaler. We improvised making a chamber out of a small plastic medicine bag and having the baby inhale the medicine. The problem was that his heart was already racing trying to cope with the work he was putting in with each breath and if I gave him too much of the inhaler, his heart would race even further pushing him right over the edge. After giving him some antibiotics and steroids, we left him with his mother, hoping for the best. As I type this now, I am waiting for someone to come and tell us that he died. Deep in my heart, I know he won’t last long, not with the way he was breathing…
Photo by: Dr. Jill John-Kall
A baby in the therapeutic feeding center in Darfur
As I stood there in the clinic watching the little boy, I thought that I wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone on the world, the notion that after seeing a child, you just wait for the bad news. The feeling that as you lay your hands on a child, listen to him breathe, watch his eyes and listen to his heart, you leave him in God’s hands because you know deep inside, that he will not live long. My thoughts are interrupted as the nurse comes to tell us that the little girl with malnutrition has died. The family is distraught, I weakly say to the mother “malesh, malesh-sorry, sorry.” I feel like the lowliest creature on earth. What an inadequate statement to make, “sorry, sorry.” Am I sorry that she lost her child or am I sorry that we didn’t save her? Is my “sorry” in empathy for her or is it asking forgiveness for me? As I hold the crying mother, I can feel her tears on my arms. And then we are called to see the little boy.
He is worse, trying desperately to breathe through his little lungs which are smothered with invisible invaders. I know that he too will not make it and it is unbearable. I am wrestling with my own demons. As a doctor, my hands should be healing hands. My mind should be able to come up with some answers, something to attack the vile bacteria who have invaded his body. An asthmatic myself, I have a soft spot for anyone who can’t breathe and he is no exception. I give him some more of my inhaler and silently beg him to get better. We leave him in the observation room and I head back to the office. It’s 7:15 p.m.
As I start working in the office, I look at pictures of Um Dukum, where I was about two weeks ago. If it’s possible to imagine, Um Dukum is a place even further away than Mukjar, bordering Chad and Central African Republic. I’m looking at these pictures for work but subconsciously, I’m looking at them to remind myself why I’m here in the first place. We have recently taken over a little rural hospital there and it will soon be a beautiful program. It’s currently a little shack of a hospital, give or take 20 beds with a primary health care component. We do outpatient consultations, immunizations, reproductive health, health education, nutrition surveillance and outreach work. I am in love with this little shack of a hospital. It’s amazing how many lives are saved there and how many more will be saved. Women get emergency C-sections, conflict victims get sewn together, children get measles vaccines and we even treat the common cold. This is such an important location because it not only serves the local population but it also serves the IDPs within Darfur as well as the refugees that come in from Chad and CAR in times of their internal conflicts.
This hospital is a Godsend for people in this area because referrals to the nearest hospital – another four hours away – are almost impossible. Any travelers by road are frequent victims of hijackings and theft and in the rainy season, the dirt roads become rivers of mud, impossible to cross. But even though the hospital is simple, it is a shining example of how minimal efforts can go a long way in the midst of Darfur. My mind drifts back to Mukjar. Last year referrals were much easier because the roads were safer. However, since December, more and more aid agencies have been targeted by bandits, hijackers, Janjaweed, government troops, rebels, all part and parcel of any relief team working in Darfur.
Photo by: Bethany Morehouse
An IMC staffer schooling a villager at a new clinic in West Darfur on some basic tenets of primary health care. Initiatives like this one help maintain Dr. John-Kall’s hope that she can make a difference in the lives of people struggling to stay alive in Darfur.
It’s almost 8 p.m. and I’ve just been told that the little boy has died. Inside, I am screaming curses while outside I remain calm since it was expected anyway. My eyes start to water and I can’t see the keyboard anymore. It’s hard when you lose a patient, even harder when they’re kids and today we lost two. I think about the inconsolable families, left with huge voids in their hearts. I think about those little kids who will never see tomorrow. I start questioning myself and what I thought I could ever achieve here. In the midst of this self loathing, self hating mood, the realist in me shouts “I told you so!” The cynic in me shouts “I told you so!” The optimist in me is quiet. I am uncomfortable because I worry that I am slowly losing my soul. I glance over to my pictures of Um Dukum. The optimist whispers, “You can still try.”
Dr. Jill John-Kall serves as Medical Director for International Medical Corps in Darfur, Sudan.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
A Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse?
The New York Times
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal
THE announcement by researchers at Boston University last week that a vast underground lake the size of Lake Erie had been discovered beneath the barren soil of northern Darfur, a blood-soaked but otherwise parched land racked by war for the past four years, was greeted by rapturous hopes. Could this, at last, bring deliverance from a cataclysmic conflict that has killed at least 200,000 people and pushed more than 2.5 million from their homes?
That hope is built upon an argument, advanced by a United Nations report released last month and an opinion article in The Washington Post by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, that environmental degradation and the symptoms of a warming planet are at the root of the Darfur crisis.
“There is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification and conflict in Darfur,” said the United Nations Environmental Program report, which noted that rainfall in northern Darfur has decreased by a third over the last 80 years. “Exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered and sustained by political, tribal or ethnic differences,” the report said, adding that Darfur “can be considered a tragic example of the social breakdown that can result from ecological collapse.”
The idea that more water — unearthed through a thousand wells sunk into the underground lake — could neatly defuse the crisis is seductive. Messy African conflicts, from Congo to Liberia, from northern Uganda to Angola, have a way of defying all efforts to solve them. Instead, they seem to become hopelessly more complex as they drag on, year after agonizing year. A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.
But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.
“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”
The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.
“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”
In fact, while different regions and social groups suffer severely, Sudan as a whole has riches to spare, in oil, fertile soil, and even water. Indeed, history suggests that this newly discovered lake is just as likely to become a source of conflict as a solution to the bloodshed.
Successive Sudanese governments and their colonial precursors have adopted agricultural policies that have almost inevitably led to conflict. They have favored large mechanized farms and complex irrigation schemes, controlled by the government and its allies, over the small, rain-fed farms that are the backbone of the rural economy in much of Sudan.
In eastern Sudan, where a rebellion has been brewing for years, the Beja people have nursed grievances since Britain and Egypt ruled Sudan jointly during the first half of the 20th century. Under their rule, irrigation programs for commercial farming deprived the Beja of their prime grazing land.
Post-colonial governments, which in the early years had the blessing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, took vast tracts of land in the name of agricultural development, turning farmers who worked their own land into wage laborers for the state and its allies.
Some Sudanese have even been pushed off their land entirely. In the early 1990s the Nuba people were forced into “peace villages,” where they provided a steady supply of cheap, captive labor to mechanized farms. In other areas, including parts of Darfur, intensive mechanized farming by the government and investors who were heedless to the need to protect the fertility of the land left large tracts barren.
A vast new agricultural scheme in a largely uninhabited swath of northern Darfur is more likely to fit into this destructive pattern than not, said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities.
“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”
During those years, the government exploited tensions over water and land to achieve its own aims, putting down a rebellion among the non-Arab tribes, who rose up because they wanted a greater share of Sudan’s wealth and power. It armed tribal militias to fight the rebels, and these militias unleashed a tide of violence that ultimately would become, according to the Bush administration and many others, the 21st century’s first genocide.
A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”
In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.
It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.
Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal
THE announcement by researchers at Boston University last week that a vast underground lake the size of Lake Erie had been discovered beneath the barren soil of northern Darfur, a blood-soaked but otherwise parched land racked by war for the past four years, was greeted by rapturous hopes. Could this, at last, bring deliverance from a cataclysmic conflict that has killed at least 200,000 people and pushed more than 2.5 million from their homes?
That hope is built upon an argument, advanced by a United Nations report released last month and an opinion article in The Washington Post by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, that environmental degradation and the symptoms of a warming planet are at the root of the Darfur crisis.
“There is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification and conflict in Darfur,” said the United Nations Environmental Program report, which noted that rainfall in northern Darfur has decreased by a third over the last 80 years. “Exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered and sustained by political, tribal or ethnic differences,” the report said, adding that Darfur “can be considered a tragic example of the social breakdown that can result from ecological collapse.”
The idea that more water — unearthed through a thousand wells sunk into the underground lake — could neatly defuse the crisis is seductive. Messy African conflicts, from Congo to Liberia, from northern Uganda to Angola, have a way of defying all efforts to solve them. Instead, they seem to become hopelessly more complex as they drag on, year after agonizing year. A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.
But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.
“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”
The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.
“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”
In fact, while different regions and social groups suffer severely, Sudan as a whole has riches to spare, in oil, fertile soil, and even water. Indeed, history suggests that this newly discovered lake is just as likely to become a source of conflict as a solution to the bloodshed.
Successive Sudanese governments and their colonial precursors have adopted agricultural policies that have almost inevitably led to conflict. They have favored large mechanized farms and complex irrigation schemes, controlled by the government and its allies, over the small, rain-fed farms that are the backbone of the rural economy in much of Sudan.
In eastern Sudan, where a rebellion has been brewing for years, the Beja people have nursed grievances since Britain and Egypt ruled Sudan jointly during the first half of the 20th century. Under their rule, irrigation programs for commercial farming deprived the Beja of their prime grazing land.
Post-colonial governments, which in the early years had the blessing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, took vast tracts of land in the name of agricultural development, turning farmers who worked their own land into wage laborers for the state and its allies.
Some Sudanese have even been pushed off their land entirely. In the early 1990s the Nuba people were forced into “peace villages,” where they provided a steady supply of cheap, captive labor to mechanized farms. In other areas, including parts of Darfur, intensive mechanized farming by the government and investors who were heedless to the need to protect the fertility of the land left large tracts barren.
A vast new agricultural scheme in a largely uninhabited swath of northern Darfur is more likely to fit into this destructive pattern than not, said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities.
“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”
During those years, the government exploited tensions over water and land to achieve its own aims, putting down a rebellion among the non-Arab tribes, who rose up because they wanted a greater share of Sudan’s wealth and power. It armed tribal militias to fight the rebels, and these militias unleashed a tide of violence that ultimately would become, according to the Bush administration and many others, the 21st century’s first genocide.
A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”
In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.
It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.
Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.
Ethiopia blocks humanitarian aid to Ogaden region
Sunday 22 July 2007 00:10.
By Jeffrey Gettleman
July 21, 2007 (NAIROBI, Kenya) — The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.
The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid, and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.
The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.
Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.
“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian government says the blockade covers only strategic locations, and is meant to prevent guns and matériel from reaching the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the rebel force that the government considers a terrorist group. In April, the rebels killed more than 60 Ethiopian guards and Chinese workers at a Chinese-run oil field in the Ogaden.
“This is not a government which punishes its people,” said Nur Abdi Mohammed, a government spokesman.
But Western diplomats have been urging Ethiopian officials to lift the blockade, arguing that the many people in the area are running out of time. “It’s a starve-out-the-population strategy,” said one Western humanitarian official, who did not want to be quoted by name because he feared reprisals against aid workers. “If something isn’t done on the diplomatic front soon, we’re going to have a government-caused famine on our hands.”
The blockade, which involves soldiers and military trucks cutting off the few roads into the central Ogaden, comes as Congress is increasingly concerned about Ethiopia’s human rights record.
Ethiopia is a close American ally and a key partner in America’s counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa, a region that has become a breeding ground for Islamic militants, many of whom have threatened to wage a holy war against Ethiopia.
The country receives nearly half a billion dollars in American aid each year, but this week, a House subcommittee passed a bill that would put strict conditions on some of that aid and ban Ethiopian officials linked to rights abuses from entering the United States. The House also recently passed an amendment, sponsored by J. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican, that stripped Ethiopia of $3 million in assistance to “send a strong message that if they don’t wake up and pay attention, more money will be cut,” Mr. Forbes said.
Ethiopia’s pardon on Friday of 30 political prisoners who had been sentenced to life in prison could ease some criticism. But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is pushing ahead with measures to more closely vet assistance to the Ethiopian military. According to human rights groups and firsthand accounts, government troops have gang raped women, burned down huts and killed civilians.
American officials in Ethiopia said they were trying to investigate the situation but that the Ogaden was too dangerous right now for a fact-finding mission. American officials said they had heard persistent reports of burned villages and that the blockade was putting the area on the cusp of a crisis.
Villagers say that anyone who criticizes the government risks getting killed. According to Ogaden Online, a Canadian-based news service that has been highly critical of the Ethiopian government and covers the region through a network of reporters and contributors, some equipped with satellite phones, four young men who were videotaped by The New York Times at a community meeting in an Ogaden village in May were later tortured and executed.
The claim could not be fully verified independently, but their identities may have been discovered by Ethiopian soldiers who had arrested three journalists for The Times in the Ogaden and confiscated their notebooks, cameras and computers.
“The army is out of control,” said Jemal Dirie Kalif, the member of Parliament who defected.
The blockade has been in place since early June, and thousands of people have already fled on foot and by camel. Two weeks ago, Abdullahi Mohammed, a 17-year-old student, walked from his village deep in the Ogaden to the nearest town with a bus station. He carried with him a few pieces of bread. He said that when he stopped to ask villagers in the Ogaden for food, they asked him for some instead. “They had nothing,” he said.
Though good rains this year have fed the few crops in the area and provided a little cushion, “The most these people can last without facing serious problems is one month, maybe two,” said David Throp, country director for Save the Children UK.
Even if relief trucks are allowed in to all the critical areas, the food might not reach the people who need it. According to humanitarian workers and several former Ethiopian officials, including Mr. Kalif, food aid is embezzled in two stages. First, soldiers skim sacks of grain, tins of vegetable oil and bricks of high-energy biscuits from food warehouses to sell at local markets.
“The cash is distributed among security officers and regional officers,” a former government administrator from the Ogaden region said in a recent telephone interview on condition of anonymity because he still works with government officials.
Then the remaining food is hauled out to rural areas where the soldiers divert part of it to local gunmen and informers as a reward for helping them fight the rebels. The former administrator said he also knew of specific cases in which army officers stole food from warehouses and gave it to the families of women whom their soldiers had raped, as compensation.
Several Western humanitarian officials estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the donor countries’ food aid to the Ogaden — aid that last year was valued at more than $70 million — routinely disappears this way. To cover their tracks, the soldiers and the government administrators who work with them tell the aid agencies that the food has spoiled, or has been stolen or hijacked by the rebels, humanitarian officials said.
Relief workers in Ethiopia have known about these problems for several years, a humanitarian official said, and have tried to set up committees of local elders to oversee distribution. But that did not work either, and aid officials eventually concluded that as long as the majority of the food was getting through, they would not stop the shipments.
When informed about these allegations, Mr. Diab of the World Food Program said, “This is the first I’ve heard of them.”
Mr. Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied that Ethiopian troops were pilfering or mishandling foreign aid. “We don’t do that,” he said.
As the food crisis looms, Western diplomats are also concerned about a separate plan by the regional government in the Ogaden to divert a share of its own budget for development projects — like schools and farming — to the Ethiopian military.
This seems to be part of the Ethiopian government’s strategy to do whatever it takes to crush the rebels, who have deep popular support and, according to the government, are getting arms and training from neighboring Eritrea, Ethiopia’s bitter enemy.
The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.
Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.
“Those Ethiopians are smart,” Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.
He described a scheme with a United Nations polio program, which was corroborated by two former administrators in the Ethiopian government and a Western humanitarian official, in which military commanders gave prized jobs as vaccinators to militia fighters, and in the end, much of the polio vaccine was never distributed.
“Army commanders are using the polio money to pay their people, who don’t pass out the vaccines, so the disease continues and the payments continue,” said Mr. Kalif. “It’s the perfect system.” United Nations officials in Geneva said they did not know whether that was happening, but that they would investigate.
When asked how he knew about the polio scheme, Mr. Kalif said: “Everybody out there knows. They’re just too scared to talk.”
“If I don’t get asylum and they send me back to my country, I’m dead,” he added. “But I was sick of being a parrot. I have no regrets.”
Will Connors contributed reporting from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
(New York Times)
By Jeffrey Gettleman
July 21, 2007 (NAIROBI, Kenya) — The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.
The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid, and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.
The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.
Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.
“Food cannot get in,” said Mohammed Diab, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian government says the blockade covers only strategic locations, and is meant to prevent guns and matériel from reaching the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the rebel force that the government considers a terrorist group. In April, the rebels killed more than 60 Ethiopian guards and Chinese workers at a Chinese-run oil field in the Ogaden.
“This is not a government which punishes its people,” said Nur Abdi Mohammed, a government spokesman.
But Western diplomats have been urging Ethiopian officials to lift the blockade, arguing that the many people in the area are running out of time. “It’s a starve-out-the-population strategy,” said one Western humanitarian official, who did not want to be quoted by name because he feared reprisals against aid workers. “If something isn’t done on the diplomatic front soon, we’re going to have a government-caused famine on our hands.”
The blockade, which involves soldiers and military trucks cutting off the few roads into the central Ogaden, comes as Congress is increasingly concerned about Ethiopia’s human rights record.
Ethiopia is a close American ally and a key partner in America’s counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa, a region that has become a breeding ground for Islamic militants, many of whom have threatened to wage a holy war against Ethiopia.
The country receives nearly half a billion dollars in American aid each year, but this week, a House subcommittee passed a bill that would put strict conditions on some of that aid and ban Ethiopian officials linked to rights abuses from entering the United States. The House also recently passed an amendment, sponsored by J. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican, that stripped Ethiopia of $3 million in assistance to “send a strong message that if they don’t wake up and pay attention, more money will be cut,” Mr. Forbes said.
Ethiopia’s pardon on Friday of 30 political prisoners who had been sentenced to life in prison could ease some criticism. But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is pushing ahead with measures to more closely vet assistance to the Ethiopian military. According to human rights groups and firsthand accounts, government troops have gang raped women, burned down huts and killed civilians.
American officials in Ethiopia said they were trying to investigate the situation but that the Ogaden was too dangerous right now for a fact-finding mission. American officials said they had heard persistent reports of burned villages and that the blockade was putting the area on the cusp of a crisis.
Villagers say that anyone who criticizes the government risks getting killed. According to Ogaden Online, a Canadian-based news service that has been highly critical of the Ethiopian government and covers the region through a network of reporters and contributors, some equipped with satellite phones, four young men who were videotaped by The New York Times at a community meeting in an Ogaden village in May were later tortured and executed.
The claim could not be fully verified independently, but their identities may have been discovered by Ethiopian soldiers who had arrested three journalists for The Times in the Ogaden and confiscated their notebooks, cameras and computers.
“The army is out of control,” said Jemal Dirie Kalif, the member of Parliament who defected.
The blockade has been in place since early June, and thousands of people have already fled on foot and by camel. Two weeks ago, Abdullahi Mohammed, a 17-year-old student, walked from his village deep in the Ogaden to the nearest town with a bus station. He carried with him a few pieces of bread. He said that when he stopped to ask villagers in the Ogaden for food, they asked him for some instead. “They had nothing,” he said.
Though good rains this year have fed the few crops in the area and provided a little cushion, “The most these people can last without facing serious problems is one month, maybe two,” said David Throp, country director for Save the Children UK.
Even if relief trucks are allowed in to all the critical areas, the food might not reach the people who need it. According to humanitarian workers and several former Ethiopian officials, including Mr. Kalif, food aid is embezzled in two stages. First, soldiers skim sacks of grain, tins of vegetable oil and bricks of high-energy biscuits from food warehouses to sell at local markets.
“The cash is distributed among security officers and regional officers,” a former government administrator from the Ogaden region said in a recent telephone interview on condition of anonymity because he still works with government officials.
Then the remaining food is hauled out to rural areas where the soldiers divert part of it to local gunmen and informers as a reward for helping them fight the rebels. The former administrator said he also knew of specific cases in which army officers stole food from warehouses and gave it to the families of women whom their soldiers had raped, as compensation.
Several Western humanitarian officials estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the donor countries’ food aid to the Ogaden — aid that last year was valued at more than $70 million — routinely disappears this way. To cover their tracks, the soldiers and the government administrators who work with them tell the aid agencies that the food has spoiled, or has been stolen or hijacked by the rebels, humanitarian officials said.
Relief workers in Ethiopia have known about these problems for several years, a humanitarian official said, and have tried to set up committees of local elders to oversee distribution. But that did not work either, and aid officials eventually concluded that as long as the majority of the food was getting through, they would not stop the shipments.
When informed about these allegations, Mr. Diab of the World Food Program said, “This is the first I’ve heard of them.”
Mr. Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied that Ethiopian troops were pilfering or mishandling foreign aid. “We don’t do that,” he said.
As the food crisis looms, Western diplomats are also concerned about a separate plan by the regional government in the Ogaden to divert a share of its own budget for development projects — like schools and farming — to the Ethiopian military.
This seems to be part of the Ethiopian government’s strategy to do whatever it takes to crush the rebels, who have deep popular support and, according to the government, are getting arms and training from neighboring Eritrea, Ethiopia’s bitter enemy.
The people of the Ogaden are mostly Somalis and ethnically distinct from the highland Ethiopians who have ruled the country for centuries, and the long battle over the region has been steadily escalating this year. The country director of one Western aid agency, who recently returned from a field visit there, said he saw two villages that had been burned to the ground and several schools that had been converted into military bases, with foxholes.
Humanitarian officials say the military is building up militias and setting the stage for clan-based bloodshed. The rank and file of the Ogaden National Liberation Front tend to be members of the Ogaden clan, and so the government has turned to other clans to form anti-rebel militias. In the past few weeks, thousands of men have been armed.
“Those Ethiopians are smart,” Mr. Kalif, 32, said. “They know Somalis are more loyal to clans than anything else.” Tactics like these, he said, drove him to defect June 20 while attending a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. He was affiliated with the ruling party, and had been representing an area in the eastern Ogaden for the past seven years.
He described a scheme with a United Nations polio program, which was corroborated by two former administrators in the Ethiopian government and a Western humanitarian official, in which military commanders gave prized jobs as vaccinators to militia fighters, and in the end, much of the polio vaccine was never distributed.
“Army commanders are using the polio money to pay their people, who don’t pass out the vaccines, so the disease continues and the payments continue,” said Mr. Kalif. “It’s the perfect system.” United Nations officials in Geneva said they did not know whether that was happening, but that they would investigate.
When asked how he knew about the polio scheme, Mr. Kalif said: “Everybody out there knows. They’re just too scared to talk.”
“If I don’t get asylum and they send me back to my country, I’m dead,” he added. “But I was sick of being a parrot. I have no regrets.”
Will Connors contributed reporting from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
(New York Times)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
