Seven months after gunmen on horseback drove Mohammed Ishaq’s family from their village in West Darfur, hunger is about to claim the life of his baby son. The shortage of food that has wasted nine-month-old Zohar’s limbs is widespread in Mornay refugee camp, where one child in five is suffering acute malnutrition. Since the beginning of the year the 75 000 refugees have had less than half the food considered necessary for survival.
The Sudanese government, accused of arming and encouraging the militias which slaughtered civilians in Darfur, is now accused of using hunger as a weapon of war.
While Mohammed Ishaq comforted his dying son under the canvas roof of a Médecins sans Frontières feeding centre, his government claimed that none of Darfur’s refugees lacked food.
In the capital, Khartoum, the foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, told The Guardian: ”In Darfur there is no hunger, no malnutrition, no epidemic diseases.”
He acknowledged that there was a ”humanitarian situation” because people had been driven from their homes to refugee camps, but accused western journalists of exaggeration. He said: ”The media are not 100% balanced. Some of them want to imagine the story.”
Mohammed Ishaq, whose wife Aisha and daughter Miriam are also with him in the camp, clasped his son’s hand tightly and said he had hardened his heart to losing him. ”I am very much afraid for my son. I can’t love him, because he is very sick. I have to love my other child.”
As he spoke, one of the camp’s doctors, Sandrine Normand, sat by the baby and tried to make him sip water from a large pink cup. Within moments he gurgled it back up.
She glanced over and whispered wearily in English, which the family cannot understand: ”He’s not going to make it.”
In Mornay the prime cause of death among under-fives is pneumonia complicated by malnutrition. There are already six deaths a day, mainly children and the elderly, and the crisis will worsen next month when the rains begin and the camps become harder to reach.
An estimated 1,2-million civilians have fled their homes in Darfur. In a neighbouring tent to Mohammed Ishaq and his family, Khadija Mohammed tended two malnourished babies and an older daughter with a bullet wound.
Of the twin babies, Hussein and Habiba, the boy looked closer to death. As his mother tried to suckle him he kept lapsing into unconsciousness. The older daughter, Arfe, a smiling five-year-old in a tattered yellow dress, tried to distract her crying baby sister by giving her a piggy-back ride.
Describing the assault on her village, in which her eldest child, a six-year-old boy, and two brothers were killed, Khadija Mohammed said: ”Six months ago we were eating wheat for breakfast when the nomads [Arab militia] attacked.
”They said: ‘Lie down on the ground.’ One pointed his gun towards me. Then he aimed his gun up and started firing. One bullet landed in Arfe’s right [buttock] cheek. Now she sometimes gets fever, she sometimes gets headaches. She has trouble walking.”
John Prendergast, a Sudan analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the government was using hunger to punish the rebellious African tribes of Darfur.
”The minister’s reaction is part of a concerted campaign by the authorities in Khartoum aimed at convincing Middle Eastern governments that the story of famine in Darfur is a western plot,”he said. ”By denying that there is a humanitarian crisis, the government can continue phase two of its ethnic cleansing campaign.
”Phase one consisted of driving people out of their villages. Phase two is designed to use starvation and disease to finish the job started by the Janjaweed militias.”
Aid workers say the government’s denial that there is a crisis is hampering relief efforts and threatening to create a famine.
At the MSF compound in El Geneina, capital of West Darfur, Jean-Hervé Bradol, president of MSF-France, accused both the Sudanese and the UN, whose World Food Programme is responsible for food shipments, of being slow to respond.
White-faced with anger after visiting Mornay, he said: ”We ask for food planning. We ask for trucks. They say they will come. Yes, in six months, when it is too late. I hope I am wrong, but in the meantime thousands will die.”
Even in peaceful years, the months between planting in May and harvesting in November are a lean season for the people of Darfur; a time when the food from last year’s harvest is dwindling and the weakest die.
In these months villagers turn to their stores and go foraging for fruit and wild plants to eat.One such emergency food is a poisonous desert plant called mulkheit, whose leaves are boiled to make it fit to eat.
But refugees in camps encircled and menaced by the militias which drove them from their homes have difficulty going out to forage. The Janjaweed have killed men and raped women who leave the safety of the camps. Each week MSF staff in Mornay treat at least five women, some as young as 12, who have been raped when they left the camp. The real figure is thought to be far higher, given the reluctance to report rape.
With greater international attention turning to Darfur, the regime is trying to reverse the ethnic cleansing which drove predominantly African tribes from their villages into the camps. On Thursday the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said he would visit the region next week, and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has also scheduled a visit to Sudan trip, increasing the pressure on Khartoum.
Last week its commissioner general for humanitarian affairs, Sulaf al-Din Salih, visited West Darfur and told aid workers that refugees should be encouraged to return home as quickly as possible.
In Zalingei camp, 72km from Mornay, local officials have been pressed to return to their villages in the hope that other refugees will follow them. Some reluctant officials have had their salaries cut off, others have been threatened with arrest. A group of elders who returned to their village, Zulu, found the unburied corpses of 40 relatives.
Relief workers, already overwhelmed by the situation in the camps, fear having to spread out across thousands of villages.
Darfur lies on an ancient trans-Saharan trade route on which peoples of Arab and African descent have mingled peacefully for centuries. Pilgrims performing the hajj and merchants dealing in perfume, beads, essential oils and henna criss-crossed the sands and scrub of Darfur on camel-back journeys from the Arabian peninsula to west Africa.
The mixed heritage is evident not only in the blend of features and skin tones, but also in the mix of customs. Refugee women in Mornay have African ritual facial scarring — three vertical stripes on each cheek — but also wear Muslim charms.
Since the mid-80s there have been violent clashes between nomadic tribes, mainly claiming Arab descent, and farming tribes who regard themselves as Africa, as the nomads have moved south from drought-stricken regions to graze their herds on the wetter and more fertile plains of central Darfur. In the past year a rebellion led by three of Darfur’s African tribes, who felt marginalised and neglected by Sudan’s Arab ruling clique, prompted the government in Khartoum to channel arms to a predominantly Arab militia, the Janjaweed.
A UN report published in May said: ”What appears to have been an ethnically based rebellion has been met with an ethnically based response, building in large part on long-standing but largely hitherto contained tribal rivalries.”
Witnesses have told human rights organisations that the Janjaweed’s scorched-earth campaign has been backed up by the government with aerial bombardment and regular army troops on the ground.
Thousands of villages of the three tribes leading the rebellion, the Fur, Massaleit and Zaghawa, have been systematically destroyed and their inhabitants killed or forced to flee. The evidence lies all around in Darfur: the scorched ruins of cube-shaped brick houses, and fields empty of crops or livestock.
Officially there has been a ceasefire between the government and the rebel factions since April. But in Mornay, the refugees and the aid workers who care for them believe, the conflict goes on.
The names of the refugees interviewed have been changed . – Guardian Unlimited Â