Never, not even in my darkest, blackest nightmare had I imagined that I would ever witness such horror. What was happening to my country? Where had all the love gone, the goodness, the humanity? Who had let the devil in and given him free reign? How could people be so evil? They were adults and these were little children... Did they have no children of their own? Had they never been children themselves? Did they have no heart, no innocence, no adult's love for a child? Were they really even human?
These were the thoughts that were firing through my mind as I helped lift that first little girl onto the bed, so that I could inspect what the Arabs, the Janjaweed, had done to her. As I gazed in horror at her limp form a keening, empty wail kept coming from somewhere deep within her throat - over and over and over again. It was a sound such as I had never heard before - a hollow cry of brutalized innocence, of innocence forever lost. It is a sound that I shall never forget no matter how long I live.
In spite of everything - the shock, the confusion, the trauma - my medical training took over now. I reached for the little girl's face, one side of which was swollen and bloody. I probed around the wound. She'd been hit with a blunt instrument - probably a rifle butt - and it needed stitches. But there were other, more urgent priorities. I checked her eyes; they were dead and glazed with shock. Unseeing. But at least she was still conscious. I felt for her pulse; it was racing and fearful. Yet it was strong, and I knew then that she was going to live. She would live - as long as I could stop the bleeding.
I lifted up her nyangour. It was slick with congealed blood. As gently as I could I tried to prise apart her shaking, bloodied knees. The soft child's skin of her thighs was criss-crossed with cut marks as if a pack of wild animals had been clawing at her. I felt her body stiffen, her leg muscles tightening and resisting, as that chilling empty wailing in her throat rose to a terrified screaming. I felt wave after wave of panic sweeping through her now - no, no, no, not again, not again, not again. *
This is an accounting of a small Darfur village whose elementary school had been brutalized and horribly violated by the sudden invasion of a group of Janjaweed, horsed Arab tribesmen. The school was full of children, aged seven to thirteen. Their teachers, as terrified as the children themselves, were unable to react to the sudden dreadful threat. They were swiftly physically overcome. With dread consequences that would forever mar their lives and leave them existing in a hell of misery and pain that would refused to end.
The description above is from the first-hand account, of a Darfurian woman, a young Zaghawa tribeswoman whose academic prowess had raised her above her peers and who had attended university in Khartoum to become an accredited medical doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynaecology, and who was determined to return to her village to perform her profession in the place she loved most.
She was caught up, as were all Darfurians in the spiral of violence between the government militias and their Janjaweed agents, and the rebel black African tribal guerrilla army determined to fight back against the brutal occupation of the Arab minority over the black African majority.
And following is another account, included in Halima Bashir's memoir of Survival in Darfur, titled aptly enough, even if understated, Tears of the Desert.
"They were shouting and screaming at us. You know what they were saying? 'We have come here to kill you! To finish you all! You are black slaves! You are worse than dogs! Either we kill you or we give you Arab children. Then there will be no more black slaves in this country.' But you know the worst? The worst was that they were laughing and yelping with joy as they did those terrible things. Those grown men were enjoying it, as they passed the little girls around...
"In all the confusion one or two of the girls managed to escape. They ran to their homes and raised the alarm. But when the parents rushed to the school they found a cordon of government soldiers had surrounded it and were letting nobody in. If anyone came too close, the soldiers shot at them with their guns. Parents could hear their daughters screaming, but there was no way they could help.
"For two hours they held the school. They abused the girls in front of their friends, forcing them to watch what they were doing. Any girls who tried to resist were beaten about the head with sticks or rifle butts.
"Before they left, they spat on us and urinated on us", Sumiah whispered. "They said: 'We will let you live so you can tell your mothers and fathers and brothers what we did to you. Tell them from us: if you stay, the same and worse will happen to you all. Next time, we will show no mercy. Leave this land. Sudan is for the Arabs. It is not for black dogs and slaves'."
* Tears of the Desert A Memoir of Survival in Darfur by Halima Bashir with Damien Lewis
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.
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