The New Yorker, August 30, 2004

DYING IN DARFUR - Can the ethnic cleansing in Sudan be stopped?

By SAMANTHA POWER

Amina Abaker Mohammed occupies a simple mud hut with a thatched roof
outside a refugee camp in northern Chad. Until earlier this year, she
lived in Darfur, the western region of Sudan, where the Sudanese
government is pursuing a campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-
Arabs. Amina is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, one of the largest non-
Arab ethnic groups in Darfur. Her village, which was burned to the
ground by Sudanese soldiers and Arab militiamen, is only fifty miles
from the camp, but by donkey the trip requires a weeklong journey
across the Sahara, through mounds of powdery sand, up and down steep
seasonal riverbeds, over gravel slopes, and around towering red-rock
mountains.

Amina, who is twenty-six and Muslim, grew up in the town of El
Fasher, in North Darfur. Twelve years ago, she married Haroun Adam
Haggar, and moved a hundred and sixty miles north, to a farming
village near the town of Furawiyah. They had six children, and made a
good living growing sorghum and herding ten cows and some five
hundred sheep. During my visit to northern Chad, in July, Amina told
me that Arab nomads used to pass through Furawiyah with their
animals, but they stopped doing so eight years ago. That was around
the time that she first heard frightening stories about the
janjaweed, nomadic Arab bandits who rode on horses and camels, and
enriched themselves by stealing livestock and attacking Africans.
("Jaan" means "evil" in Arabic, and "jawad"
means "horse"; "janjaweed" means, roughly, "evil horseman.") The
janjaweed included local camel herders, and also nomads who migrated
to Darfur from Chad and West Africa in the nineteen-seventies and
eighties.

During the planting-and-harvest season, from August to November,
Amina's oldest child, a ten-year-old named Mohammed Haroun, moved
south with the livestock in search of grass and water. When the
animals were brought back, four months later, they were ready to be
sold, or used for leather, food, and milk.

In the months when Mohammed was at home, Amina recalled, she would
accompany him and their animals to one of Furawiyah's two dozen
wells. Amina would straddle the well, drop the bucket to the bottom,
thirty feet down, and haul up the cool water; then she would empty
the bucket into a trough for the animals, or into bags made of donkey
hides, for storage. Mohammed would immediately follow her, sending
the bucket tumbling into the darkness and using all his strength to
mimic his mother's maneuvers.

By January this year, Amina told me, the townspeople of Furawiyah
were on alert. The government was trying to crush a resistance
movement that had emerged in Darfur, and it had enlisted the
janjaweed as its foot soldiers. Amina's neighborhood had been
inundated with family members, tribal kin, and displaced strangers,
who had been driven from their homes by a combination of janjaweed
raids and government air assaults. Many of these visitors had not
stayed long. They had stopped in Furawiyah for water and quickly
resumed their journey to Chad. They urged Amina to do the same. "The
janjaweed are nearby," they said. "Leave while you still can."

Amina was no stranger to tribal killings. Five years earlier, the
janjaweed had attacked a village outside El Fasher and murdered
Africans, including two of her uncles and four of her cousins. But
Amina told herself that her town would escape the violence spreading
through Darfur. Unlike many towns in the region, it was guarded by
policemen, who had helped fend off cattle rustlers in the past. Other
villagers were less sanguine. Government helicopters had been flying
overhead for three months, and some tribal leaders insisted that the
Air Force was surveying the town for bombardment. They were right:
soon, a military aircraft fired four rockets, two from each wing, on
Furawiyah. The attack terrified Amina; although one rocket failed to
explode, the others left large craters in the ground. She and her
husband refused to abandon their land, but they sent all their
children, except Mohammed, to hide in the mountains.

On January 31st, Amina's husband was away visiting his family. Not
long after dawn, when Amina and Mohammed arrived at the wells, they
heard the sound of approaching planes. Fifteen minutes later, Amina
recalled, the aircraft began bombing the area around the wells, where
a group of her neighbors had also gathered. She and Mohammed were
separated, as she fled with a few of the family's donkeys, and he
tried to assemble their panicked sheep. According to Amina, dozens of
people and hundreds of animals were killed in the onslaught.

In the wake of the planes came Sudanese soldiers, packed into trucks
and Land Cruisers; they were followed by hundreds of menacing
janjaweed on camelback and horseback. Most of the janjaweed wore
turbans around their heads and mouths, so that only their eyes were
visible. They carried hijaab, tiny leather boxes containing Koranic
verses, which were meant to keep them safe from bullets.

When Amina saw the janjaweed approaching, she hurried the donkeys to
a red-rock hillock three hundred yards away. She assumed that
Mohammed had fled in another direction, but she turned and saw that
he had remained at the wells, with the older boys and the men, in an
effort to protect the animals. He and the others were surrounded by
several hundred janjaweed. As the circle closed around her son, she
ducked behind the hillock and prayed.

By nightfall, the sounds of gunfire and screaming had faded, and
Amina furtively returned to the wells. She discovered that they were
stuffed with corpses, many of which had been dismembered. She was
determined to find her son, but also hoped that she wouldn't.
Rummaging frantically around the wells by moonlight, she saw the
bodies of dozens of people she knew, but for a long time she was
unable to find her firstborn.

Suddenly, she spotted his face-but only his face. Mohammed had been
beheaded. "I wanted to find the rest of his body," she told me. But
she was afraid of the janjaweed, who had remained nearby to celebrate
their conquest with a roast of stolen livestock. She gave up and
carried her son's remains to the mountain where her other children
were hiding. "I took my child's head, and I buried him," she told me,
dabbing her tears with the tail of her head scarf. A week later,
Amina took her five remaining children on the seven-day trek to Chad.
The family's last surviving animal-a donkey-died upon their arrival.

Two days before the 2000 Presidential election, George W. Bush met
the Reverend Billy Graham for breakfast in Jacksonville, Florida.
They were joined by Graham's son Franklin, the president of
Samaritan's Purse, a Christian relief-and-development organization
that has worked in Sudan since 1993.

Sudan, the largest nation in Africa, had been mostly mired in civil
war since it won independence from Britain, in 1956. The central
conflict, between Muslim government forces in the North and rebels in
the South, began in 1955, abated in 1972, and resumed in 1983. Some
two million people died because of the war, and many of them were
Christians. The situation was deeply troubling to American
evangelicals, and Franklin Graham had led an effort to raise money
for victims. During the breakfast meeting, Graham told me, he urged
Bush to turn his sights to the suffering of Christians in Africa. "We
have a crisis in the Sudan," Graham said. "I have a hospital that's
been bombed. I hope that if you become President you'll do something
about it." Bush promised Graham that he would.

Sudan had already attracted an unusually formidable constituency in
Washington. In the nineties, the Clinton White House imposed
successive sanctions against the Sudanese government. Sudan had
become a haven for terrorists-including Osama bin Laden, who had
settled there in 1991-and had repressed religious minorities in the
South; in addition, it had failed to crack down on a slave trade that
had emerged there. Backed by Christian and African-American
constituencies, many U.S. lawmakers had travelled to Sudan. Senator
Bill Frist, a surgeon, made several short trips there, serving as a
volunteer doctor at the hospital in southern Sudan that had been
bombed shortly before Graham's meeting with Bush.

President Clinton's approach was largely confrontational. In 1996, he
withdrew the U.S. Ambassador, citing terrorist threats against
American officials. (There is still no U.S. Ambassador in Khartoum.)
The same year, the United States and Saudi Arabia pressured Sudan to
expel bin Laden, who subsequently left for Afghanistan. In 1998,
after Al Qaeda's attacks on the American Embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania, Clinton ordered a Tomahawk-missile strike on the Al Shifa
pharmaceutical factory, which was suspected of producing chemical
weapons. (This suspicion remains unproved.) Meanwhile, the
Administration made little progress in curtailing Sudan's civil war.
In 1999, Clinton announced the appointment of a special envoy to
Sudan, but then never met with the person who filled the post.

President Bush was more attentive. He rejuvenated a multilateral
peace process that had been hosted by Kenya since 1993. On September
6, 2001, he appointed John Danforth, an ordained Episcopal minister
and a three-term senator from Missouri, his special envoy for peace
in Sudan.

During the 2000 campaign, Bush frequently invoked the values of
Midland, the Texas town where he and his wife, Laura, grew up,
telling the New York Times, "People-if they want to understand me-
need to understand Midland." Midland is home to several churches with
sister congregations in southern Sudan. In November, 2001, Midland
hosted the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, an
annual evangelical event. Some forty Midland churches participated,
and many of them passed out leaflets on Sudan and devoted part of
their Sunday services to the civil war and the slave trade there. A
half-dozen Sudanese refugees spent the weekend in Midland and shared
their stories. "They took us out of our comfort zones," Deborah
Fikes, one of the event's organizers, said. "We Christians in the
U.S. have to use our resources not to build bigger churches, and not
to be even more concerned with being pro-life, but to show how we
value life by protecting the lives that are being lost every day
because of war, disease, and starvation." Midland's churches raised
money for Sudanese schools, and local religious and civic leaders
petitioned the White House and wrote letters to the government in
Khartoum. The Chief of Mission at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington
deemed "the town of George Bush" important enough to respond
personally to these letters.

In 2002, Fikes and other activists invited thirteen Sudanese exiles
to visit Midland during its annual Christian-music festival, and
paired them with local youths to construct two portable "Sudanese
villages." The first had seven wooden huts with grass roofs, a large
thatch-roofed church, and a market, modelled on that of a typical
southern Sudanese town. The second consisted of six huts that had
been burned or partly demolished. Fikes had ordered some plastic
skeletons from a Halloween Web site and set them aflame ("with the
town fire marshal on hand!"), so that they could be displayed as
charred corpses. The American evangelical community's intense
interest in Sudan put Danforth and the rest of the U.S. government
team under considerable pressure.

The Bush Administration was also aware that Sudan's oil reserves
yield two billion dollars in annual revenue, although just a fraction
of the oil has been tapped. (Oil was discovered in Sudan, by Chevron,
in the nineteen-seventies, but it has been exported only since 1999.)
These reserves, which were being exploited by China, Canada, and
Sweden, were off limits to American companies, because of a 1997
executive order barring U.S. oil companies from operating in Sudan.
Before U.S. companies could legally begin prospecting Sudan would
have to end its civil war.

Danforth's overtures were surprisingly well received. The Sudanese
government, a U.S. diplomat told me, was desperate to end U.S.
sanctions and to court American oil investors, and in the wake of
September 11th and the war in Afghanistan it wished to avoid being
added to the Administration's target list. The southern rebels, who
saw that they stood little chance of dislodging the government, were
also ready to negotiate.

Thanks largely to the sudden surge in U.S. involvement, the peace
talks moved forward. Both sides agreed to allow the posting of a
small team of civilian protection monitors. Fighting in the South
abated, and Sudan's rival parties inched closer to a long-term
political agreement that they hoped would end the civil war. The
President, Omar al-Bashir, provisionally agreed to share about half
the oil revenues with the South, and to permit Christians in the
North to escape punishments dictated by Sharia-traditional Islamic
law. Bashir even offered to give the South the right to secede from
Sudan six years from the signing date, if irreconcilable divisions
remained. In return, the rebel leader, John Garang, said he would be
willing to serve as Vice-President in a postwar government. By
December, 2003, negotiators were so certain that a deal was imminent
that two seats were reserved for Bashir and Garang at Bush's 2004
State of the Union address. The stage was set: Bush would delight his
Christian constituency; U.S. businesses would gain access to Sudan's
oil; and Sudanese civilians would stop dying. Moreover, at a time
when the U.S. was isolated and mistrusted abroad, Bush would prove
that he was capable of making peace as well as war-and in the process
be seen as uniting Arabs and Americans, Christians and Muslims.

There was a difficulty with this scenario, however: Amina Abaker
Mohammed's home region of Darfur had caught fire. At the same time
that the Sudanese government was offering autonomy and oil profits to
southern Sudanese, people in another neglected region, whose leaders
had been excluded from the U.S.-backed peace talks, had risen up and
demanded political reform and economic assistance. Just when Bashir's
regime seemed poised to stop its raids in southern Sudan, it had
launched a bombing campaign in western Sudan. Washington had a
problem-and the people of Darfur had a far greater one.

Darfur, which is roughly the size of Texas, was an autonomous
sultanate until 1916, when it was conquered by Britain and
incorporated into Sudan. The area is topographically diverse-high
desert in the north flows into lush grasslands in the south-and
ethnically kaleidoscopic. It is populated by some ninety tribes and
countless sub-clans. Virtually all of Darfur's six million residents
are Muslim, and, because of decades of intermarriage, almost everyone
has dark skin and African features. To a visitor, Darfurians appear
indistinguishable.

Despite the tradition of ethnic mixing, the population has recently
begun subdividing between "Arabs" and "Africans," who are known,
derogatorily, as zurga, or "blacks." People of Arab descent tend to
be nomadic, herding camels in North Darfur and cattle in the south.
The three largest African tribes are the Fur-Darfur means "land of
the Fur"-the Zaghawa, and the Masaaleit. The Africans generally farm,
though certain groups, like the Zaghawa, sometimes maintain farms
while also sweeping south with their herds during the harvest season.
Competition among the tribes-for economic, not ethnic, reasons-has
always been fierce, but tribal leaders customarily resolved these
disputes, and their decisions were respected by the authorities in
Khartoum.

In the nineteen-eighties, however, competition for land intensified.
There was a regional drought, and the expanding Sahara began
transforming arable soil into desert. The introduction of tractors
and other mechanized farming equipment fed the ambition of some
African farmers. Arab herders in North Darfur began to resent the
seasonal forays of Zaghawa herdsmen into Arab-occupied grazing areas.
African farmers grew hostile to the camel-riding Arab nomads from the
north who increasingly trampled their farmland as they roamed in
search of pasture. Arabs from countries to the west-Mauritania, Mali,
Niger, and Chad-also began flooding the region, exacerbating the
feuds. Farmers who had once celebrated the annual return of Arab
nomads, whose animals had fertilized their farmland and helped carry
their harvests to market, began to impede their migrations.

Instead of intervening to defuse these tensions, Khartoum's leaders
essentially ignored them. A previous government had weakened the
tribal-administration system, in favor of state institutions that had
little legitimacy in Darfur. As a result, the region lacked a trusted
system for resolving conflicts. The tribes grew more polarized, and
they began gathering arms to defend their economic interests. Between
1987 and 1989, serious battles broke out between Fur farmers and Arab
camel herders. Some twenty-five hundred Fur were killed, forty
thousand cattle were lost, and four hundred villages were burned;
five hundred Arabs died, and hundreds of the nomads' tents were
burned. Even though a local inter-tribal conference was held in 1989,
its recommendations for compensation and punishment went largely
unheeded-leaving outstanding grievances that would explode fourteen
years later.

At 5 a.m. on Friday, April 25, 2003, a blast shook a tiny, one-runway
airport in El Fasher, the town of Amina's birth. It was followed by
six rapid detonations. Sleeping Sudanese soldiers, who were encamped
in a nearby garrison, awoke and scrambled out of their barracks
toward an ammunition depot across the street. Many of the soldiers,
some still in their nightclothes, were picked off by machine-gun fire
as they ran. Rebel Darfurian marksmen were perched high in the trees.

The attackers, members of a then obscure group, the Sudanese
Liberation Army, did damage far greater than their numbers or their
reputation. Employing two hundred and sixty men, forty Toyota Land
Cruisers, four trucks, and mainly small-arms fire, they managed to
take over a vital military outpost. Because the attack occurred on a
Friday, the day of prayer in Sudan, when many soldiers are home with
their families, the Sudanese military had mounted few patrols around
the airport, and the rebels sneaked unchallenged onto the tarmac.

The raid, which lasted several hours, killed around a hundred
soldiers. Five Antonov airplanes and two helicopter gunships were
destroyed. (The government is said to have fewer than a hundred
attack aircraft.) The rebels at first tried to disable the planes
with haphazard gunfire; then someone shouted, "Hit the fuel tank,"
and the aircraft erupted in flames. The rebels also seized nineteen
Land Cruisers and six trucks, and emptied several warehouses that
were filled with weapons. (They almost made away with eight tanks,
but they couldn't find the keys.) When the rebels left El Fasher,
around midday, they had lost only nine men, and had kidnapped the
head of the Sudanese Air Force, General Ibrahim Bushra Ismail, whom
they released forty-five days later, after protracted negotiations
with tribal leaders.

The rebel group, which was formed in February, 2003, had legitimate
complaints. Darfur's inhabitants felt that the region was being
ignored. The Sudanese government rarely paid for road building and
repair, schools, hospitals, civil servants, or communications
facilities in Darfur. Those who considered themselves ethnically
African were angered by the government's practice of awarding most of
the top posts in the region to local Arabs, even though they were
thought to be the minority there. Disgruntled Darfurians had appealed
to the government to include their concerns on the agenda of the U.S.-
backed peace process. This effort failed, and many concluded that, if
they ever wanted to see their needs met, they would have to do what
John Garang had done in the South: take up arms against the Sudanese
government and try to get the world's attention.

The Sudanese Liberation Army's founding manifesto, which was posted
on the Internet and circulated by hand in Darfur, invited Arabs and
Africans alike to join in protesting Khartoum's "policies of
marginalization, racial discrimination, exclusion, exploitation, and
divisiveness." The group's objective, it said, was "to create a
united democratic Sudan on a new basis of equality, complete
restructuring and devolution of power, even development, cultural and
political pluralism and moral and material prosperity for all
Sudanese." All regions should have significant autonomy and work
together under the banner of "Sudanism"-a shared identity for Arabs,
Africans, Christians, and Muslims. The S.L.A. attempted to
demonstrate its inclusiveness by appointing an Arab, Ahmed Kabour
Jibril, to be its commander in South Darfur.

At first, the Sudanese government did not take the S.L.A. seriously,
and dismissed its demands. At a rally in El Fasher on April 12, 2003,
President Bashir downplayed the rebellion, calling it "acts of armed
banditry." Two weeks later, after the devastating airport raid, the
government decided to treat the rebels as a major threat.

During the conflict with the rebels based in the South, the Sudanese
military had honed a strategy for combatting insurgents: the Air
Force bombed from the sky, while Arab tribesmen, armed by the
government, launched raids on the ground. In Darfur, the Sudanese
Army needed to rely even more heavily upon local Arab militias. A
majority of the Army's rank-and-file soldiers were from Darfur, and
they could not be trusted to take up arms against their neighbors and
kin. (Many Darfurians had served with the Army in the war against
Garang's rebels.) By July, 2003, the government was appealing to
Darfur's Arab tribal leaders to defend their homeland against rebels
whom they branded as "tora bora" (an allusion to the terrorist
fighters based in the caves of Afghanistan).

Musa Hilal, a forty-three-year-old Arab sheikh, was one of the first
to answer the government's call, and he soon became the coordinator
of the janjaweed in Darfur. I met Hilal recently, at the Khartoum
airport, outside a hangar for charter flights. It was 5:30 a.m.
Hilal, who is six feet four and has an athletic, commanding build,
wore a white turban over a white lace skullcap; a pale-blue, crisply
starched djellabah with a white, black-striped gossamer sash; and
dark-brown loafers. Hilal's skin is the color of sand-much lighter
than that of most Arabs in Darfur-and he has bright hazel eyes, long,
curly eyelashes, and a faint goatee. He has the confident gait of
someone who has spent his life in charge. During our encounter, he
carried only two items: a wooden walking stick capped with the head
of a hound dog ("a gift from Switzerland") and a Nokia camera phone,
which, when opened, displayed a photograph of himself on its screen.

Hilal was named sheikh of his Arab tribe, the Um Jalloul, in 1984,
when he was twenty-three. He claims that his appointment was the will
of the people, but others told me that he bullied his way to the
title, assaulting rival contenders. Hilal long had a reputation in
Darfur as a troublemaker who instigated skirmishes against the Fur
and other African tribes, with the aim of controlling more grazing
land and amassing greater wealth for himself. But generally he
enjoyed immunity. Indeed, the men under his command were notorious
for the lengths to which they went to cover their trails. Ibrahim
Suleiman, the former governor of North Darfur, told me that whenever
one of Hilal's men died in an attack on a rival tribe he was beheaded
by his fellow-tribesmen. The decapitated trunk was left at the scene,
but the head was spirited away.

In the nineties, government officials tried repeatedly to have Hilal
arrested. In 2002, they finally succeeded; Suleiman resorted to a
tactic familiar to prosecutors of the Mafia-citing tax evasion, he
detained Hilal. After being imprisoned for five months, Hilal was
released on the condition that he would not return to Darfur. But,
with the emergence of the S.L.A. rebellion, the government reassessed
the situation, and decided to put Hilal's skills to use in Darfur.
When Suleiman objected, he was fired. In 2003, with funds and arms
from the government, Hilal set up a training camp near his home town
of Mistiriyah, and rallied Arabs to the cause of suppressing the
S.L.A. rebellion and populating the land with Arabs.

Hilal agreed to meet with me because he wanted to clear up the
impression in the West that he is a janjaweed. When I mentioned the
word, Hilal, who sees himself in regal terms, scoffed at what he
considers a grave insult. In Sudan, nobody ever calls himself a
janjaweed. Although many Africans in Darfur apply the term to any
Arab civilian who carries a gun, government officials and Darfur's
Arab-militia leaders, like Hilal, apply it only to the bandits-
African and Arab-who have been hijacking and looting in Sudan's
remote areas for decades. Western diplomats use "janjaweed" more
broadly, to describe the Arab militiamen who have carried out much of
the pillaging, killing, and raping in Darfur. These men, who receive
orders on Thuraya satellite phones, have joined up with the Sudanese
Air Force and Army, killing as many as fifty thousand Darfurians and
destroying nearly four hundred villages. More than a million and a
half people have fled from their homes-fifty refugee camps have been
established in Chad, and a hundred and fifty unofficial sites have
sprung up in Sudan-but this hasn't stopped the janjaweed. They
continue to terrorize, murdering men and raping women who dare to
venture outside the camps.

"Don't you people understand what a tribal leader does?" Hilal asked,
tapping his walking stick on the floor. "I answered my government's
appeal, and I called my people to arms. I didn't take up arms
personally. A tribal leader doesn't take up arms. I am a sheikh. I am
not a soldier." I asked him about eyewitness reports that he had
participated in burning and looting in Darfur. He laughed and rolled
his eyes. "That is rebel gossip-speak," he said. "The janjaweed have
taken advantage of the troubles to pillage. I've had to fight them
myself, as a tribal leader."

Hilal offered to take me and two colleagues on a tour of Darfur. The
Sudanese government provided the transport-a sign of how entwined he
is with the authorities. We flew the four hundred miles from Khartoum
to the El Fasher airport in a government-chartered plane, an old
Russian aircraft that had few windows and was sweltering inside. When
we reached El Fasher, Hilal was embraced on the tarmac by the
Sudanese colonel in charge of border intelligence. Then we piled into
a military transport helicopter; incongruously, female flight
attendants were on board, as was a box of Thuraya satellite phones
and a cooler filled with soft drinks. The flight attendants and the
cooler made the return journey; the phones did not.

As the helicopter swept over the decimated landscape, Hilal stared
placidly out the window, seeming not to notice the blackened and
emptied villages below-a bleakness interrupted only occasionally by a
few, presumably Arab, villages where boys still herded animals in the
fields and women washed clothes and gathered firewood. But these
emblems of the selectivity of ethnic cleansing were not of concern to
Hilal. He wanted to show us his harmonious ties with the African
tribes of Darfur.

When our helicopter landed in the town of Kala, in North Darfur, more
than a thousand people rushed out to greet us. As we disembarked,
Hilal turned to us and said, sarcastically, "You're in my territory
now. You're in territory under the control of the leader of the
janjaweed." A group of men strode forward, chanting "Allahu akbar";
they shouted praise for Hilal and shook walking sticks in the air.
The women hung back and assembled in an orderly row; the collage of
colors from their sarongs and scarves was blinding in the desert
sunlight. A dozen or so of the women then performed a screeching song-
and-dance number in Sheikh Hilal's honor.

When the welcomes subsided, Hilal led us underneath the largest tree
in the semi-desert town, where we were served dates and orange Fanta.
Tribal representatives rose to commend Hilal and the unity that he
had fostered. "We live in harmony together in our different colors
and tribes," one said. "We love each other. We marry each other. If
you feel sick in one part of your body, you feel pain all over. We
are like that here." Hilal, whose motions are deliberate and
dramatic, tossed date pits onto a silver tray. He grew visibly
impatient with the speeches and began barking commands to those
around him as his supplicants droned on. "All of us have chosen a
leader, the suitable man who will show us the good way," another
said. "The man we have chosen is Musa Hilal. That's why we live here
in peace."

I showed Hilal a recent State Department map that depicted the
hundreds of villages that had been destroyed and burned by combined
janjaweed and Sudanese Air Force attacks. The map designated
destroyed villages in Darfur with small orange-and-yellow flames.
Hilal pointed to Kabkabiyeh, a town in North Darfur where there had
recently been a lot of fighting, and where many flames were clustered
on the map. "Yes," he said, nodding. "This is where the government
clashed with the rebels and aerial bombardment occurred." Then he
squinted and gave the map a disapproving glance. "Many more villages
have been destroyed than this!" he said. "What about Korma?" he
asked. "Why is there no flame there?" I gave him my pen and urged him
to demarcate his area of dominion. He drew a large triangle within
which there was not a single flame marker.

Suddenly, Hilal turned toward the proceedings and cut off the elderly
African man who was heaping encomiums upon him. "Let's have a woman
speaker," Hilal snapped, in Arabic. Two women came forward;
predictably, one was an African Fur, the other an Arab.

Hilal appears to have unlimited power in Darfur. A statement from
local authorities in February instructed "security units in the
locality" to "allow the activities of the mujahideen and the
volunteers under the command of Sheikh Musa Hilal to proceed" in
North Darfur and "to secure their vital needs." The document stressed
the "importance of non-interference" and directed local authorities
to "overlook minor offences by the mujahideen against civilians who
are suspected members of the rebellion."

Later, in Khartoum, I met with Salah Abdallah Gosh, the head of the
National Security and Intelligence Service, in his office. "Musa
Hilal is not a criminal," Gosh said. Western diplomats say that Gosh
is one of the principal architects of Khartoum's war in Darfur; he
had never before granted an interview to a Western journalist. "The
non-Arabs passed the Americans wrong information. They said, 'Musa
Hilal is the leader of the janjaweed.' But he is not. He is a leader
of the Arab tribes. Musa Hilal is not a man who would burn down a
village and kill the people and take their money. He is not like
that. He was invited by the government to back the government Army,
and he gave the people guns and leadership."

While in Khartoum, I also met with Mustafa, an eighteen-year-old from
Kabkabiyeh, who had briefly trained with Hilal's militia. (He asked
that his last name be withheld.) In October, 2003, because of the
fighting around his home town, Mustafa's school was closed. That
December, he said, Hilal put out a call to young men in the area to
attend a military camp in Mistiriyah, promising guns and a salary
equivalent to ninety-five dollars per month. Although Mustafa is from
an African tribe, he signed up; his parents were aghast. "You are
going to join the janjaweed?" his mother said. "You are African, they
are Arab. They will kill you." Mustafa, who believed what he had been
told by the town recruiter, insisted that he was not becoming a
janjaweed but, rather, was joining multi-ethnic "border forces,"
which would bring peace to the area.

In January, Mustafa and several hundred other youths boarded trucks
that took them to the bustling Mistiriyah camp, where about five
thousand fighters were said to be training. To Mustafa's frustration,
they were not immediately armed. "Musa Hilal is the only one who can
distribute weapons," the youths were told. Five days after they
arrived, a Sudanese military-transport helicopter landed, and Hilal
emerged from his tent, nearby. He presided over the unloading of
twelve boxes of Kalashnikov and G3 rifles, Mustafa said, but he did
not use the occasion to welcome the new cadets; instead, he returned
to his tent for a feast. This time, the boys were told that they
would get guns only when they embarked upon an official mumariya, a
military mission.

Mustafa was already growing restless when some two thousand Arab
militiamen returned to Mistiriyah from the field. The commanders
arrived first, in eight Land Cruisers. More than a thousand men
followed on horseback, with the remainder on camels or on foot. The
camels were weighted down with chairs, bed frames, blankets, radios,
suitcases filled with valuables-even the doors of houses. The
fighters also brought hundreds of sheep, goats, and cows. The men
paraded around the camp singing songs lampooning the Africans of
Sudan. A few men who knew that Mustafa was African teased him,
saying, "We are the lords of this land. You blacks don't have any
rights here." He was told that the Arabs would be sent to attack
local villages and civilians, while Africans like him would be sent
into high-risk conventional battle with the S.L.A. rebels-their
ethnic kin. After two weeks in the camp, Mustafa had seen enough. He
fled and has been in hiding ever since.

A week later, in South Darfur, I met Mahasin Abaker, the wife of
Khadir Ali Abdul Rahman Hussein Abukoda, who was a prominent local
leader of the Fur tribe. She was at home with her husband on March
27th, when Hilal stormed into town wearing a Sudanese Army uniform
with two stripes and an eagle. A military vehicle arrived at the
front door, and Khadir was taken away. Soon thereafter, Mahasin
recalled, Hilal's janjaweed horsemen and camel riders began looting,
stripping shops and houses bare, even seizing the carpet from the
local mosque. Khadir never returned home, and his wife feared that he
had been killed. In April, though, Mahasin received a note from him,
in which he said that he was being held by Hilal. On May 19th, one of
Hilal's officials sent a ransom note to the local emir of the
Fur. "Concerning Khadir, if you want him released, send ten million
Sudanese pounds"-four thousand dollars. "For the urgent resolution of
this matter, please send the money as soon as possible. If you do
not, his fate will be in your hands." The ransom note, which Mahasin
showed me, was signed by the office of military intelligence in
Mistiriyah. So far, Khadir's tribe has been able to raise only 7.5
million Sudanese pounds.

As Hilal's forces have expanded their zone of power, they have
targeted Arabs as well as Africans. In May, some three thousand
fighters arrived in the village of Khar Ramla. Witnesses told me that
Hilal, this time dressed in a green camouflage Sudanese military
uniform, summoned the male villagers to a meeting at sunset in a
warehouse on the outskirts of the village. When the men arrived, they
were surrounded by Hilal's gunmen and told that they could not leave.
For the next four hours, the men heard the sound of the militiamen
firing their guns and the screams of the women. The village was
looted, and at least nine women were raped.

During our encounter, Hilal expressed disgust at the idea that his
men would stoop so low as to commit rape, but his forces have been
repeatedly accused of this crime. In February, the town of Tawilla,
forty miles southwest of El Fasher, and its surrounding villages were
attacked by Hilal's forces, witnesses said; seventy-five people were
killed, and more than a hundred women and girls were raped-six of
them in front of their fathers. A unicef study found that some girls
were raped by as many as fourteen men. Surviving villagers told
international investigators that, in addition, a hundred and fifty
women and two hundred children had been abducted. Their whereabouts
are unknown.

After meeting Amina Abaker Mohammed in Chad, I decided to travel,
along with John Prendergast, of the International Crisis Group, to
see the wells in Furawiyah where she said her son had been killed by
janjaweed forces. In order to make our way to Furawiyah, which was in
an area said to be in rebel hands, we had to cross the Chad-Sudan
border illegally. The Chadian authorities had tightened up their
border patrols in order to stop the janjaweed from crossing into
Chad, to chase refugees and to loot villages. (In June, Chadian
forces killed sixty-nine janjaweed who had attacked the village of
Birak, which is four miles inside Chad.) Not surprisingly, it has
proved impossible for the Chadian authorities to seal the eight-
hundred-mile desert frontier. As a result, our only real challenge
was scaling a steep wadi in an aging Land Cruiser. This done, we
began the long, slow drive through the Sahara toward Furawiyah.

Our journey across the inhospitable terrain of northern Sudan
resembled a virtual tour of the solar system: we saw the soft yellow
powder of Earth's great deserts; the red-rock mounds of Mars; the
volcanic gravel of Venus; the deep gray craters and gullies of
Mercury. The hundred-and-thirty-degree heat, along with the terror
inflicted by the janjaweed and the Air Force planes, had driven human
life either into exile or into hiding. We felt utterly alone.

After five hours on the road, having advanced at less than ten m.p.h.
and having seen only scattered camel carcasses, we suddenly glimpsed
a procession of men and horses on the horizon, minuscule amid the
expanse of desert. As we approached, we saw fourteen men making their
way east with walking sticks in the scorching afternoon sun. Five
horses hauled trailers piled high with rugs, sacks of millet, and
various household necessities. The horses were so emaciated that
their pelvic bones stuck out sharply.

The men were participating in a kind of underground railroad. They
were Darfurian refugees, now living in tents in Chad; together, they
had rented the horses and the trailers and stocked them with
emergency food stores, which they were delivering to their kin who
remained trapped in Darfur-those too old, scared, or infirm to make
the trek. Once the refugees had emptied their load, they would travel
for eight days to get back to Chad, carrying on the trailers people
who wished to escape.

One of the men, Mahmoud Ibrahim Mustafa, who is thirty-eight, was
making his second trip. He had already collected his two wives and
seven children; now he was returning to gather his brother and sister-
in-law and their seven children. S.L.A. officials claim that hundreds
of thousands of people are hiding out in Darfur. Since many of them
left their stores of grain behind and were robbed of their animals,
they may be at risk of starvation.

The next day, as we drove deeper into Darfur, we came to the Zaghawa
village of Hangala. Zaghawa villages are constructed functionally and
hierarchically. The head of the household occupies a small, round
stone hut, which is sealed with a conical thatched roof. The hut is
around fifteen feet in diameter and sits in the center of the family
compound. Around this hut are as many as seven smaller huts-one for
each of the man's wives. The compound is enclosed by a fence, which
is built of either straw or tree branches.

At Hangala, we found only the stone walls of the huts, which had been
set ablaze. Each was filled with two feet of ashes; without their
thatched roofs, the charred huts resembled beheaded figures. In the
burned remains of Hangala-a village that had never had running water
or electricity, and that was accessible only by following tire tracks
in the thick sand-we came across the remnants of a jewelry box, a
bicycle, women's slippers, and bottles of French perfume. The
residents' animal and land holdings had made them comparatively rich,
and this wealth had made them an inevitable target for the marauders.
Of the four hundred and eighty people who lived in Hangala before the
attack, we were later told, forty-six were killed. The rest are now
homeless, scattered throughout Sudan and Chad.

The village abutting Hangala had been ransacked but not burned,
perhaps because the attackers had wanted someplace to sleep the night
of their rampage. One hut contained a child's backpack and
his "Duckzilla" notebooks, which contained exercises in mathematics,
Islamic studies, and Arabic. In another house, we found small
packages of beans and nuts, a sign that the inhabitants had fled in a
hurry, and a branding iron. As we left one of the huts, where pots
had been overturned and valuables looted, we spotted three
toothbrushes tucked into the thatch in the roof. Nestled next to them
was a sheet of paper that had been folded into tight squares; upon
opening it, we saw that it was a prayer from the Koran, urging Allah
to keep watch over the family home.

Furawiyah was less than an hour's drive from Hangala, but before
entering town we had to "register" with S.L.A. rebels, who manned a
base on the outskirts. The S.L.A. commander in Furawiyah, a lanky
thirty-eight-year-old Zaghawa wearing Army fatigues, a bright-yellow
turban, and wraparound Ray-Bans, was lounging on a rug in the shade
when we pulled up to the base. Under a nearby tree, unguarded, was a
stack of a dozen or so rocket-propelled grenades. On his rug lay a
laminated package of hot-pink pills. "They are malaria pills," the
commander explained. "We stole them from the government. Everything
we have we have stolen from the government." He didn't have malaria
and, in this malaria-free area, stood little chance of catching it.
He was just flaunting the fruits of victory.

I asked to be directed to the wells where Amina had collected water.
As we drove toward them, with a local guide, we passed a large gray
rocket that was partly lodged in the sand; this was the undetonated
Sudanese Air Force rocket that Amina had described to me. We also
passed an enormous crater, at least twenty-five feet in diameter and
five feet deep, where another bomb had exploded. Antonovs are
imprecise bombers, and the Sudanese Air Force crew simply heave their
munitions out the planes' trapdoors. As a result, the planes have
proved bad at killing S.L.A. rebels but good at bluntly wiping out
civilian life.

"Here are the wells," our guide said as we pulled up to the red-rock
hillock that Amina had depicted on a map she had drawn for me. I saw
only more Sahara sand at the base of the rock. "What wells?" I asked.
The guide kept pointing to the same patch of desert, and, frustrated,
I stepped closer. There, barely visible beneath the pale-yellow sand,
were the faint outlines of one large stone well and two smaller ones.
This was where Amina and Mohammed had watered their animals, and
where Amina had found the corpses of her slain neighbors and the head
of her son. The janjaweed had buried the wells and their victims
beneath many feet of sand. In so doing, they had not only made it
more difficult for their crimes to be investigated; they had also
destroyed vital water sources. Among the twenty-five wells in the
Furawiyah area, only three were left unmolested-and those may soon
dry up, owing to overuse.

The killers in Darfur are not always so careful. The young man who
showed us the wells urged us to accompany him on a short drive
outside Furawiyah. Fifteen minutes after leaving the town, he told us
to park our Land Cruiser at the base of a slope and ascend by foot.
The stench of decomposing flesh greeted us before we saw that rotting
bodies were lying in the gullies on either side of us. There were the
bodies of fourteen men, dressed in bloodied djellabahs or in shirts
and slacks. Seventeen bullet casings lay scattered around them. The
victims appeared to have been driven to this remote spot-the deep
tread of vehicle tires was still visible-and then divided into two
groups and lined up in front of the ditches. They had all been shot
from behind, except for one man. His body lay not in a ditch but in
the center of the slope, and one of his palms was outstretched, as if
he were pleading for mercy.

Neither President Bush nor Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the
United Nations, spoke publicly about the killings in Darfur before
March of this year, by which time some thirty thousand people had
died as a result of ethnic cleansing. Thanks to the relentless
efforts of Andrew Natsios and Roger Winter, two officials at the
United States Agency for International Development, the U.S.
government had begun attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Darfur
in February, 2003. But the Administration's top officials remained
quiet. Cabinet members were, of course, preoccupied with Iraq, but
even Washington diplomats who monitored Sudan chose not to speak out,
for fear of upsetting the North-South peace process. By this time,
some hundred thousand Darfurians had fled to Chad, in addition to the
million or so people who had been displaced within Darfur-yet the
North-South negotiations continued, as if nothing unusual were
happening elsewhere in Sudan.

Last March, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, Mukesh
Kapila, who had served a year there without denouncing Darfur's
horrors, erupted. "The only difference between Rwanda and Darfur is
the numbers involved of dead, tortured, and raped," Kapila said at
the final press conference he gave before leaving his post. He told
the BBC, "This is ethnic cleansing, this is the world's greatest
humanitarian crisis, and I don't know why the world is not doing more
about it." Kapila's statement was well timed. The following month,
the world's leaders were to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of
the systematic slaughter of eight hundred thousand Rwandans. Both
Bush and Annan would have to issue statements on Rwanda, and the
media interest aroused by Kapila's declaration made it impossible for
the two leaders to avoid the subject of Darfur. In a statement on
April 7th, Bush condemned the "atrocities" in Darfur, saying, "The
government of Sudan must not remain complicit in the brutalization of
Darfur." Annan went further, raising the possibility of "military
action." In May, Natsios and Winter issued a grim mortality survey
predicting that, even if world leaders substantially increased aid to
Darfur, three hundred thousand people would be dead by December. If
world leaders ignored Sudan, they warned, a million could die.

The international media was extremely slow to post journalists to the
region. Those who went tended to remain at the Chad border, for the
Sudanese government often denied journalists' visa requests. But in
May firsthand reports from Darfur began appearing, and the editorial
boards of the Washington Post and the New York Times regularly
publicized the crisis. Between April 1st and August 19th, the Post
ran twelve editorials. The Times ran only four, but its columnist
Nicholas Kristof travelled twice to the Chad-Sudan border and wrote
ten passionate columns about the atrocities.

On Capitol Hill, where interest in Sudan's oppression of Christians
had always been high, members of Congress finally shifted their focus
to Darfur. "We were late," Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman from
Virginia, told me. "We so wanted to get peace in the South that it
was like the Simon and Garfunkel song: 'A man hears what he wants to
hear and disregards the rest.' " Wolf and Sam Brownback, a Republican
senator from Kansas, visited Darfur in June and returned with grim
refugee testimonies and video footage of torched villages. In July,
Congress passed a resolution, introduced by Donald Payne, a
Democratic congressman from New Jersey, to describe the killings in
Sudan as "genocide"-the first time that Congress had described an
ongoing massacre in such terms.

Bush's evangelical base offered full backing. That same month,
Franklin Graham called the White House and told one of Bush's
aides, "Just because you've signed a peace deal with the South
doesn't mean you can wash your hands of Darfur." Samaritan's Purse,
Graham's charity, is now transporting food aid by plane from Khartoum
to Darfur. "Killing is wrong, whether you're killing a Jew, a
Christian, or a Muslim," Graham told me. "I'm as concerned about
what's happening in Darfur as I am about what happened in southern
Sudan. It's evil. God made the people there in Darfur. For us to
ignore them would be a sin." In August, fifty-one evangelical
Christian leaders, representing forty-five thousand churches, called
on the President to consider sending troops to Darfur to stop
the "genocide."

For many African-American leaders, the targeting of Darfurians on the
basis of ethnicity has rekindled memories of apartheid. On July 13th,
Charles Rangel, the New York City congressman, and fifty protesters
sang "We Shall Overcome" and were arrested in front of the Sudanese
Embassy in Washington. "We acted too late to save millions of Jews
during World War II," Rangel said. "We didn't act at all when
hundreds of thousands of innocents were slaughtered in Rwanda. We
have the opportunity now to stop a genocide and we must act."
Numerous other protesters were arrested in July, including Bobby
Rush, a Democratic congressman from Illinois; Joe Hoeffel, a
Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania; Ben Cohen and Jerry
Greenfield, the co-founders of Ben & Jerry's, the ice-cream company;
Rabbi David Saperstein, from New York; and four grandmothers from the
Washington area.

In the end, America contributed $192.4 million in relief aid, pressed
for multilateral U.N. denunciations, and dispatched Secretary of
State Colin Powell to Darfur. The U.S. even compiled a kind of "Most
Wanted" list of janjaweed leaders, who it said should be arrested and
tried. No. 1 on that list was Musa Hilal.

Sudanese officials like Salah Gosh have developed two methods for
deflecting American criticism. First, they meet every charge with a
reference to the quagmire in Iraq. In Khartoum, when I asked Gosh
about the Sudanese attacks on civilians, he told me that armies are
made up of individuals. "In Abu Ghraib, there are violations by the
U.S. Army," he said. "But the violations are not from the whole Army.
The violations are from individuals. You cannot generalize." When I
asked why Sudan had not complied with American demands that it disarm
the janjaweed, he said, "The United States is facing those terrorist
people in Iraq. Is it possible for the United States to disarm those
criminals? Is it possible for the United States, with all of its
equipment-it is a superpower-to disarm these people in one month, two
years? Danforth stands there in the United States and says, 'The
government of Sudan has just a few days to control the janjaweed and
to stop those attacks.' If it's so easy, why don't you do it in Iraq?"

When I broached the prospect of international intervention, he
said, "It will make things worse. People in Sudan do not like
foreigners to control them. They would love to fight them. The United
States should take care of the information it is building its
decisions on. We have lots of cases where the United States was
fooled by bad information-the bombing of the Al Shifa factory, the
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq . . . We told the United
States, 'We have bin Laden in Sudan. We can monitor him and divert
his efforts.' They ignored our claim. We were told to send him out.
What is the loss for the United States? How many people died?"

The government in Khartoum has also attempted to hide the evidence of
its ethnic-cleansing campaign. It has integrated the janjaweed into
the regular Army and police forces, pretended to arrest and prosecute
war criminals, and tried to break up large camps of displaced persons.

Sudanese officials say that some eight thousand new police officers
are starting to patrol Darfur. But refugees told me that they
recognize many of these policemen as former janjaweed. Around the
town of Kas, in South Darfur, where forty thousand refugees had taken
shelter inside and outside local schools, the new police were
visible. But it was clear that they had not been trained. One
policeman, riding a camel, was wearing the navy-blue trousers of the
Sudanese police and the green camouflage top of the Sudanese Army.
Others were loitering in the Kas market wearing crisp blue police
uniforms, but their turbans, the rifles slung over their shoulders,
and their flip-flops gave them away as former janjaweed. In the local
parlance, they had been "re-hatted."

When I met with Salah Gosh, on July 11th, he said that forty-six
janjaweed had been arrested in Darfur. A week later, a government
official upped the number to sixty-seven. The state-owned media
reported that in Nyala, a town in South Darfur, ten janjaweed had
been sentenced to amputation of their right hands and left feet for
their role in recent assaults. To confirm this, I scheduled an
appointment with Nyala's top judge and got his permission to visit
the jail on July 21st. He presented me with files on the recently
arrested. Seventeen janjaweed had been convicted so far, he said, and
nineteen were awaiting trial. "This isn't just talk," he said,
handing me the indictments. "This is proof." The documents were
neatly filled out, and each listed the name of the prisoner and the
section of the criminal code that had been violated. But when I
looked more closely the papers seemed suspicious: every one of the
nineteen new arrivals was said to have been processed on July 14th
and was scheduled to begin trial on July 30th. I made my way into the
prison courtyard, where sixty-three inmates were gathered. The men
who had already been convicted were sitting cross-legged on the right
side, wearing mud-brown prison uniforms, and those awaiting trial sat
on the left, dressed in grimy white djellabahs. The prison director
urged me to question them. I asked how many had been arrested in
2004. Only four men raised their hands. Who had been accused of rape?
None. Had any of them arrived at the jail on July 14th? No. Had any
of them even been arrested in the past three months? No. The Sudanese
government was attempting to pass off criminals arrested several
years ago as janjaweed but hadn't informed the prisoners of the ploy.

While in South Darfur, I also visited Sania Deleiba, a village south
of Nyala, which was once home to four hundred and seventy-four
families. In May, witnesses told me, government and janjaweed forces
attacked, killing twelve people and looting and burning virtually all
the houses. This summer, the government promised to provide monthly
food supplies and an official police presence, and more than two
hundred families returned. When I toured the village, residents
explained that they had been unable to obtain food in Nyala or in the
refugee camp in nearby Kalma. They said they thought they might still
be able to plant in time for the August rains.

It is no accident that this tiny village was chosen as the site for
such a pilot-or, more likely, Potemkin-program. Sania Deleiba is an
easy ride from Nyala, one of the few Darfur towns with an airport, on
roads that will remain passable throughout the rainy season.
International dignitaries could be escorted there for short visits,
and they would find battered but resilient Africans living alongside
their Arab neighbors.

None of this means that Sania Deleiba is a safe place to be. When I
visited, the police were scattered about the town's perimeter, but
they looked incredulous when I asked if they would try to arrest any
janjaweed, some of whom had been seen lurking on horseback
nearby. "No way," one said. "We hope that when they see us they won't
attack. But if they do there's nothing much we can do."

On numerous occasions, the Sudanese government has threatened to
force people in the camps to go home, but the U.N. has insisted on a
voluntary-return policy. As a result, in August there were a number
of incidents in which masked gunmen swept into camps in the middle of
the night and abducted village leaders. The leaders returned the next
morning, limping and bruised, saying that their assailants had
threatened to kill them if they didn't take their people home.

In Kas, the town where schools had become impromptu shelters,
officials were determined to move displaced people to a nearby swampy
area, where they would be separated from the town by a wadi. Several
police tents had been set up in the swamp, in order to create the
impression of a secure environment. But, as I talked with the
policemen inside one tent, a forbidding trio of men on camelback
carrying G3 rifles rode by outside. I pointed to the janjaweed and
asked the policemen, who were African, if they would make arrests if
they learned of attacks on the refugees. "We don't have instructions
to arrest them," one said. "If we captured them, we would be sacked."
Another added, "There are six of us here and thousands of them. They
have heavy weapons and modern weapons, and we have these old
Kalashnikovs. If we arrest one of them, they'll come after our
families." The policemen said that the government had given each of
them only one gun cartridge.

Soon after Colin Powell's visit to Sudan this summer, the government
relaxed its visa and travel requirements, and the number of
expatriate aid workers leaped from three dozen, in March, to nearly
five hundred, in August. The U.N., which had established a food
program in Darfur, expanded its scope, reaching nine hundred thousand
of the estimated one and a half million in need. Nonetheless, the
displaced continued to live in deplorable conditions. In the camps,
sanitation was poor, raising worries about outbreaks of cholera and
measles. Residents remained vulnerable to constant janjaweed attacks.
And they still had no prospect of returning home to safety; janjaweed
assaults on African villages continued.

Not long after Powell's visit, I went to the refugee camp in Kalma,
where thirty-five thousand displaced persons have arrived just since
June. New residents had taken up patches of land at the edge of the
camp, and, using grass and acacia branches, were beginning the
meticulous process of assembling their new homes. Some hunted
fruitlessly for plastic sheeting or clothing that could shield their
families during the nightly downpours. The new arrivals shared
familiar tales of attacks by the janjaweed and the Sudanese military.

Throughout the crisis in Darfur, the government's agenda has remained
obscure. Why, exactly, has it armed and funded the janjaweed, bombed
African villages, and purged or killed so many non-Arabs? One theory
holds that the slaughter and deportations in Darfur are part of a
master plan that was hatched in the late nineteen-eighties, by
political hard-liners, to "Arabize" Sudan. Around that time, Colonel
Muammar Qaddafi, of Libya, began promoting "Arabism" as a political
ideology in sub-Saharan Africa, backing armed Arab rebels in the
region and fostering grander dreams of an "Arab belt." In October,
1987, twenty-three Arab intellectuals sent a letter to Sadiq al-
Mahdi, Sudan's Prime Minister at the time. The letter, which was
published in the local press, credited the "Arab race" with
the "creation of civilization in the region . . . in the areas of
governance, religion and language." The signatories demanded a larger
proportion of local, state, and national jobs, warning, "If this
neglect of the participation of the Arab race continues, things will
break loose from the hands of the wise men to those of the ignorant."
Soon afterward, the process of removing Africans from senior civil
posts in Darfur and replacing them with Arabs began. The current
assaults on Darfurians who are considered "black" are thought by some
to be phase two of Sudan's Arabization plan.

A second theory, which is slightly kinder to the leaders in Khartoum,
holds that the Sudanese government, which in 2002 had just agreed to
grant a right of secession to rebels in the South, could not afford
to placate another rebel group. To do so would have emboldened
disaffected minorities throughout the vast country, ultimately
unravelling the patchwork state of Sudan. The government was
particularly reluctant to lose Darfur, a Muslim territory. It
therefore decided to quash the rebellion, gambling that Musa Hilal
and other Arab tribal leaders in Darfur, as well as Arab-immigrant
fighters, would serve as reliable proxies. (In return, the Arab
militias could freely plunder villages.) The Sudanese government
could hardly have predicted that an obscure, inaccessible Muslim
region like Darfur would become a cause celebre in America. Nor could
it necessarily have expected that, even after it had emptied out more
than half of Darfur's African villages, the janjaweed would continue
attacking so many civilians.

Regardless of whether Sudan's murderous campaign in Darfur stems from
a racist conspiracy, a counter-insurgency strategy run amok, or a
combination of the two, its policies deserve to be condemned. Yet
international opinion has been strangely divided. Europe's lingering
hostility to the Bush Administration over the invasion of Iraq seems
to have infected its response to Darfur. In April, at a meeting at
the U.N. Human Rights Commission, in Geneva, European diplomats
opposed a strong American denunciation of the atrocities, preferring
a resolution so watered down that Sudan welcomed it. At a time when
America had given twenty-eight million dollars to the U.N.'s Darfur
relief program, Germany had given one million dollars, and France
nothing.

European officials have also been unduly trusting of Khartoum's
assurances that it intends to solve the crisis. This summer, Renaud
Muselier, the French secretary of state for foreign affairs, argued
publicly that the Americans were overreacting. He invoked recent
comments of Kofi Annan, who said that the killings and purgings in
Darfur were only "bordering on ethnic cleansing." Muselier told Radio
France, "Kofi Annan, who is very careful in his choice of words . . .
has said very clearly that this was not genocide. That is what I also
believe." When asked if the atrocities in Darfur constituted ethnic
cleansing, he said, "No, I firmly believe it is a civil war." The
Sudan Vision, a government-controlled newspaper, hailed the French
stand, crediting Paris with "slamming U.S. foreign policy."

The State Department has stopped short of calling the atrocities in
Darfur genocide, but Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. Ambassador-at-
Large for War Crimes Issues, has pointed to "indicators of genocide."
The campaign of massacres, rapes, and ethnic cleansing may well fit
the definition of genocide established by the Genocide Convention,
which does not require a Rwanda-style extermination campaign but,
rather, an attempt to "destroy" a substantial "part" of a group "as
such." But genocide is a crime based on intent, and pin-pointing who
has acted with the goal of destroying Darfur's non-Arab groups will
remain difficult unless investigators dig up the wells, examine the
ravines, apprehend perpetrators, and ascertain the command-and-
control relationships among Sudanese leaders, Air Force pilots, and
Arab militiamen. This will not happen soon: the major powers have not
established an intelligence-gathering operation in Darfur that is
sophisticated enough to gauge either the death toll or the intentions
of perpetrators. In the meantime, the debate over semantics has only
further distracted the international community from the more
important debate about how to save lives.

In late July, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution imposing
an arms embargo on the janjaweed and the S.L.A. rebels, and
threatening the Sudanese government with "further action," such as an
asset freeze or a travel ban, if it did not show substantial progress
within thirty days in disarming the janjaweed and bringing war
criminals to justice. But the Sudanese government has made it clear
that it will not disarm Musa Hilal or other Arab tribal leaders. The
Arab tribes have carried guns for decades, and they would never give
them up. Moreover, if they did, Arab civilians could be left
vulnerable to revenge attacks by aggrieved Africans.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and
protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most
wants to avoid. When Britain and Australia announced in July that
they were considering sending troops for peacekeeping, a Sudanese
group calling itself Mohammed's Army appealed to young Muslims to
fight the arriving foreigners. "We call upon you to head immediately
to Darfur and dig the ground deep for the mass graves for the
crusader army," one recruiting statement said. Musa Hilal, who in
recent months had been lying low in Khartoum, reportedly returned to
his base in Mistiriyah to begin training his troops for clashes with
foreign peacekeepers.

The most realistic hope for peacekeepers comes from the fifty-three-
member African Union. In April, the S.L.A. and the Sudanese
government signed a temporary ceasefire, and the A.U. agreed to send
a hundred and twenty unarmed monitors to Darfur. It was a hopelessly
small number, given the size of the region, and those observers were
slow to deploy. Moreover, the A.U. officials were limited to
investigating violations of the ceasefire. They weren't supposed to
combat the biggest threat: janjaweed and military attacks on Darfur
civilians. In August, Rwanda and Nigeria agreed to send a hundred and
fifty soldiers each to Darfur, and the A.U. countries are pushing for
permission to send several thousand more, with a mandate to protect
civilians. Sudan has thus far refused.

Although the A.U. seems likely to expand its presence, almost all the
displaced Africans I spoke with in Darfur said they would trust only
Western forces to bring peace. African troops were too susceptible to
bribes, they said, and African governments would end up siding with
Khartoum, as they had in the past. "We will not return to our homes
until the white people come and make us safe," Abdum Shogar Adem, a
thirty-two-year-old father of three, told me at the Kalma camp in
July, soon after his village had been attacked by government
helicopter gunships. The Western powers, however, are not likely to
answer Adem's call. The United States military is overstretched,
given the occupation of Iraq, and it is unwilling to contribute
troops for a peacekeeping mission. It has not even offered to equip
or transport A.U. troops, which lack the logistical sophistication to
deploy on their own.

The Bush Administration has been admirably willing to send relief to
Sudan and to condemn the janjaweed. But, having alienated many of its
U.N. allies with its unilateralism and perceived moralism, it has
been unable to rally other nations to the cause. Countries like
Russia and France have exploited the U.S.'s loss of standing
internationally to justify their own inaction on Sudan. Meanwhile,
the Administration, which views the International Criminal Court with
contempt, has not urged the U.N. Security Council to refer the
atrocities in Darfur to the court, although no other international
institution is equipped to prosecute such crimes. In the end, the
U.S. has applied just enough pressure to get humanitarian relief to
many Darfurians, but not enough to persuade the perpetrators of
violence to lay down their arms. Meanwhile, the seasonal rains have
begun to fall, reducing the reach of international aid workers and
substantially increasing the risk of cholera, dysentery, and mass
death.

It is hard to view Amina Abaker Mohammed, the refugee in Chad whose
son was beheaded, as fortunate. Her husband, too, never returned
home, and is presumed murdered. But in certain respects her current
state is preferable to that of displaced people who are still in
Darfur. Although she has to worry about feeding her five children,
she can feel relatively secure when she goes scouring for firewood.
In Sudan, by contrast, displaced people in camps remain as fearful of
janjaweed attacks as they were when they inhabited their villages.

Because the food that comes from aid groups must be cooked before it
becomes edible, in the camps wood is a commodity as precious as
millet and flour. Foraging for wood is women's work in Sudan; but,
given the high incidence of rape outside the camps, families have
begun sending out women who are old or considered unattractive. This
does not seem to have deterred the janjaweed, however.

In Kas, the displaced people living in makeshift tents near the
schools must venture outside town to find wood. When the refugees
first arrived, they had to walk a few hundred yards into the
neighboring savanna to find fuel; now, with the nearby wood used up,
they must walk for as long as an hour-and that will only increase
with time. Two days before I arrived, in late July, Aisha Abdullah
Youssef, twenty-two, and Asha Muhammed Abd el-Karim, twenty-seven,
were captured by janjaweed soldiers while gathering wood, and were
gang-raped. When I spoke with the women, they kept their eyes fixed
on the ground. Their attackers had stripped them of their clothes,
and they had returned naked to the crowded camp; word spread quickly
that they had been violated. As I listened to their stories, a queue
formed of people who wished to share their tales of recent assault.
Others pointed to reddened gashes in their feet and backs; the marks,
they said, were from worms that had pierced their flesh at night as
they slept on the hard earth.

I noticed a woman who was sitting nearby with a child on each side of
her. She was trying to stir millet over a fire, but she had no wood
and was having little luck using grass to make a flame. Both children
looked extremely weak; their legs were bone thin, and pus caked
around the eyes of one child. The woman, Rashida Abbas, came from
Kailek, a town a few hours away; in March, Rashida said, more than a
hundred men had been summarily executed there, including her husband.
She had six children before the conflict, but only four had survived.

When the janjaweed came, Abbas told me, her oldest child, a boy, had
run ahead of her. She had carried her infant on her back, and she had
taken one of her girls in each hand. This hadn't left her with a free
hand for either of her younger sons, five-year-old Adam Muhammed and
seven-year-old Hassan Muhammed. They trailed behind as the Arab
soldiers threw matches onto the roofs of the huts. An Arab militiaman
suddenly grabbed the boys, and Abbas pleaded that they be released.
The gunman warned her that if she didn't shut up, all of her children
would be killed. She backed away as instructed, but as she did so the
man threw five-year-old Adam into the fire. "Mama, Mama!" he shouted,
as the flames consumed him. Hassan, his older brother, briefly
escaped his captor's grasp, but as he ran toward his mother he was
shot in the back twice and died instantly.

It is no wonder that Darfurians say that they will not return to
their homes unless international peacekeepers are deployed to protect
them. They will never trust Khartoum again.

As I talked with Musal Hilal in the El Fasher airport waiting room,
he discussed the possibility that he and other janjaweed leaders
could have their assets frozen and their ability to travel
curtailed. "I have no assets in international banks, so that is not a
problem," he said as he watched Sudanese soldiers ready our plane for
its flight back to Khartoum. "But the travel ban-that would be a
humiliation. I am a tribal leader. My reputation comes above anything
and everything."

Hilal is aware that if the international pressure on Khartoum
intensifies the government might sell him out. This explains why he
courts Western journalists, staging elaborate shows of African-Arab
unity. But he also knows how risky it would be for the government to
challenge him-even if it wanted to appease its international critics.
Khartoum's leaders rely on tribal militias as their main weapon of
war. And, in Hilal's case, the Sudanese government helped create him,
and he knows too much.

"The government call to arms is carried out through the tribal
leaders," Hilal said. "Every government comes and finds us here. When
they leave, we will still be here. When they come back, we will still
be here. We will always be here."