”Well, what would you do in your country?”
That was the question a group of Darfuri refugees put to an aid worker in their camp near the Sudanese border 18 months ago. Anna Schmitt was trying to collect documentary evidence of the atrocities, but the camp elders were growing increasingly frustrated that their voice was not being heard in the West. One day they asked her the obvious question. ”So what do you do, when you want your leaders to listen to you?”
Schmitt thought about it. What would she do? The only thing she could think of seemed so culturally incongruous it sounded almost suburban, even absurd — but she told them anyway. At home, what we usually do, she explained, is get as many people as possible to sign a piece of paper. Then we present it to our politicians. And we hope the sheer moral force of so many signatures will make them pay attention and do something about it.
”This is just not something that happens in Africa,” Schmitt says, on a cellphone from Chad. ”This is so not part of the culture here. But there I was, with this small group of people in the room, six men and one woman, so I told them.
”And I gave them examples of how it works. They were very excited, but I didn’t think it would go any further. I’ve seen that excitement before — but then you go away and nothing comes of it, just because of how life is.”
Six weeks later, Schmitt was back in the United Kingdom when a parcel arrived. ”When I opened up the box,” she recalls, ”the smell of dust and smoke from firewood filled the whole room.” Inside were bundles and bundles of handwritten notebooks — bearing 25 000 signatures.
”Not just signatures,” she adds, ”but whole paragraphs.”
The camp elders took the concept of a petition and elaborated it into a human tapestry of personal testimony. Undeterred by low literacy levels in the camp, they had distributed notebooks among the educated members, and one by one illiterate refugees had dictated their personal experiences, and stated their political appeals, signing their testimonies with a thumb print.
Many had left their mark in red ink — ”because they wanted it to stand for blood” — and the children’s entries were often illustrated with drawings. The covers of the notebooks were addressed in meticulously neat handwriting ”To the Security Council”, or ”To the UN”.
”Your Excellency, Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown,” one entry from a 13-year-old begins. ”With best greetings. Life in the refugee camps is difficult because the area is desert and there are a lot of desert storms.”
He tells Brown that ”the parents in the camp are always in a panic”, and ”if the women venture out to gather firewood they are raped by the locals”. A young woman describes what happened when the Janjaweed attacked her village: ”When they ran out of ammunition, they burned people and killed them with knives.”
Eyewitness accounts of terrible violence are delivered with bald simplicity between appeals, which sound more bewildered than enraged.
”Why does the government still ask for more time which gives them a chance to kill more people while the United Nations has not made a move yet? Why is the international community still keeping quiet, although the Darfur disaster is the worst human disaster? Does the international community support what is going on? Do they agree with Omar al-Bashir that blacks are worthless? Why have they not done anything yet?”
To Schmitt’s astonishment, nearly three quarters of the entries came from women, for whom such an explicitly political act was not just culturally anathema but potentially dangerous. Many had seen their husbands and children murdered, and knew the repercussions of signing their name could be violent, even deadly.
”It needs to be stressed,” Schmitt emphasises, ”this is just not something that happens in this culture. For us it’s no big deal. We do petitions all the time. But for them, it was extraordinary. When I went back, I’d say to them, are you sure? Do you realise the risk? But they said, if we need to die, we might as well die. We’re in an open-air prison as it is. They’re in their fifth year of this now. I think they just realised that unless they spoke out, the perpetrators were going to keep going.”
Schmitt herself is cagey about divulging too many logistical details of her role in coordinating the petition. After receiving that first box, she returned to help distribute more notebooks in other camps.
”I realised they were serious, and that other camps might want the opportunity to take part too. But I had to be very discreet. I can’t say how the petitions got out of the camps and back to Britain. If this came to the ears of the Sudanese government, and they knew which camps had signed, it would be easy for them to retaliate with bombs. And if the government in Chad or Sudan thought the humanitarians were helping with an action like this, they could close their programmes down.”
More than 30 000 signatures have now been collected in the camps, and the notebooks have passed into the safekeeping of the UK-based charity, Waging Peace. They represent by far the biggest petition ever to come out of that region of Africa, and Waging Peace will present the notebooks to Gordon Brown in Downing Street. Their dusty, handwritten, ink-stained message is emphatic and unambiguous.
”We, the mothers, want the UN peacekeepers to enter Darfur immediately.”
In another signatory’s words: ”We want the UN forces to disarm the Janjaweed and end ethnic cleansing, rape, random killing.” One entry reads simply, ”We are in such a sorry state. We want them to secure our country, and end the fighting.”
”It’s pretty simple,” Schmitt says. ”They want a UN peacekeeping force and they want an end to the violence. My promise to them was that I would bring their petition to the West.” — Â