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| HOMELESS: Ache Ali and her daughter flee after their village in Darfur was bombed. Jan-Joseph Stok |
Sudan bombs Darfur rebels – and civilians – amid calls for a 'no-fly' zone.
A Dutch journalist and photographer traveled with rebel forces in Darfur in February. They were pinned down by government forces for weeks, before escaping across the border into Chad.
By Elwin Verheggen | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 24, 2009 edition
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03.23.09
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Pat Murphy talks with
Monitor correspondent Elwin Verheggen about Sudanese planes bombing militiamen and residents in Darfur.
Karoya Laban, Sudan - Ache Ali has lost four children and a husband.
A Sudanese cattle herder, she rides on a donkey cart with her youngest child, a daughter, wedged between hundreds of other fleeing Sudanese, herds of bleating goats, and other livestock.
"They [the children] ran away three days ago when our village, Buhera, was bombed." she calls out over the din, hoping for some help.
For weeks, she says that her family lived in fear, as the region was bombed day and night by Sudanese government aircraft. In early February, when this reporter caught up to her, she was fleeing her village. She is just one of the roughly 30,000 displaced Sudanese who has fled the region around Muhajirya in recent weeks.
Muhajirya is strategically located along a transit route in southern Darfur. It became the scene of intense fighting in mid-January. The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels captured the town after a fight with another militia, a Sudanese Liberation Army faction known as the SLA-Minni Minawi, which in 2006 had declared loyalty to the government.
To oust JEM, who are supported by neighboring Chad, from Muhajirya, the Sudanese government launched an offensive, sending in ground troops and bombing the area for about three weeks. Residents say most of the bombers were Russian-made Antonovs, but they also saw MiG fighter aircraft. About 10 villages were bombed and dozens of civilians were killed.
Hide the cattle
During the bombing runs, Mrs. Ali's husband, and the other cattlemen in the village, had taken their herds, the most valuable assets in Darfur, to a safe area. In the past, janjaweed raiders had taken their cattle, she says. But Ali doesn't know where her husband is now – or whether he is still alive.
When bombers hit Buhera in late January, Ali was with her daughter, using the donkey cart to gather firewood. They were just outside her village. After she saw bombs exploding, she says, she ran back to her home. "I saw my house and those of several neighbors' burning. The villagers told me that my children had run away screaming." Four people died the attack.
For two days, Ali searched for her missing children in the area around Buhera. But when people from the surrounding villages began fleeing their homes because the Janjaweed were reportedly approaching on horseback, she decided to leave. "I quickly dug up my emergency supply of food that I had received from the World Food Programme, and got out of there," she says.
Her cart is also now loaded with the food and the belongings of other refugees on foot. Ali says that she doesn't know where she is going. She is following the flow of thousands of other refugees.
After the government air strikes on Muhajirya at the end of January, all of the aid agencies stationed there withdrew. Only one compound – with a few hundred blue helmets of UNAMID, the UN/African Union peacekeeping force – remained open. It became a gathering place for thousands of war refugees.
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