NORTH DARFUR, Sudan, 5 August 2004 — The students, farmers and former soldiers who make up the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel force battling government-backed militias in the Darfur region say they fight for all Sudanese marginalized by the Khartoum government. “The key jobs are monopolized by the elite of the north,” the outfit’s secretary-general, Bahan Idriss Abu-Garda, told AFP as he sat in a camp in a “liberated zone” in the desert of North Darfur region.
“We want all the Sudanese people to share all the jobs in Sudan, from president to the lowest jobs, according to their qualifications and not their origins,” he said. The JEM, along with the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), rose up in February last year to fight for the rights of black African ethnic minorities in the western region.
Since then, the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum has come under massive diplomatic pressure to rein in the government-backed Janjaweed militia who are accused of terrorizing the region’s minorities since the launch of the uprising.
The United Nations describes the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as currently the world’s worst, with up to 50,000 people dead and more than a million driven from their villages. “The marginalized areas have been marginalized for 50 years,” complained Abu-Garda.
The men who fight alongside him were students, teachers, farmers or soldiers before they joined the rebel ranks.
Some are dressed in combat gear, others in the region’s traditional long robe and loose trousers. All wear the country’s trademark headgear, which protects them from both the sun and desert dust.
Each man has an assault rifle, most of which the rebels say were seized after battles with the horse- and camel-riding Janjaweed. Their four-wheel drive vehicles sometimes sport rocket-propelled grenade launchers or machine guns. One rebel who gave his name as Omar said he used to be a captain in the Sudanese military. “I couldn’t stay in army while my brothers in Darfur were joining the rebellion to fight the Janjaweed,” the 37-year-old told AFP.
Jamal, another rebel, said he was so outraged by reports of massacres that he gave up an easy life in Khartoum, where he lived with his wife and children and ran a business, to return to his native Darfur to become as a rebel in the harsh desert.
The rebels of the JEM, which says it has about 7,000 fighters, live a nomadic life, frequently moving their camps or taking refuge in villages abandoned after attacks by the Janjaweed. They say about 800 villages have been burned down and some 70,000 civilians killed in what they call a genocide.
Here in this desert camp, as a few men head off on a patrol, others sit around and play cards or chess as they listen to one fighter making melancholy music from a harp he had fashioned out of an old oil can and a bit of wood. Abu-Garda compares the situation in Darfur with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. “The government arms some tribes to kill other tribes. The first time it happened in Rwanda, now it’s in Sudan.”
The rebel leader, whose group insists it is not seeking independence for Darfur, said he wanted his oil-rich nation to take full advantage of its natural resources and provide development for all its people. “Sudan is not a poor country considering the resources. (But) all the developed areas are in the north. We need equal development and equal distribution of the wealth in Sudan.”
The JEM says it has respected a cease-fire it signed with the Khartoum government in April along with the second rebel group. The rebel forces say they control all the rural areas of Darfur, with government troops confined to the region’s towns.
The Sudanese government in May signed a deal with another rebel group to end more than 20 years of civil war in southern Sudan, which was also fuelled by claims of discrimination against non-Arabs. The accord included power sharing and deals on the division of oil wealth. Observers say that the Darfur rebels are hoping they can secure a similar deal.
The flow of people fleeing Darfur region has slowed but violence continues amid growing food needs and a health situation set to worsen with the coming rains, aid groups warned yesterday. Those needing food aid will almost double in the next few months, reaching two million in October against 1.2 million at present, according to the World Food Program.
Roger Winter, of the USAID organization, expects the region to need emergency relief for at least another 18 months, since farmers driven from their land could not sow this year’s crops.
