I am a war child. A survivor plagued by memories. When I close my eyes, the faces look back at me. I see my mother who was killed and my aunt who was raped in front of me. Their faces are etched in my soul and will be forever.
When they open their eyes, children in Darfur see the same. The rape, the killing, the running for cover … it is happening right now in Darfur.
As a survivor of the war in South Sudan, I feel I should use my story to highlight Sudan’s smouldering war in Darfur. My childhood was blighted by violence. At seven, I was forced to flee from my home. At eight, I was a soldier with an AK-47 in one of Africa’s most brutal wars. Today the suffering my family went through is being replayed in Darfur and it pains me to the core that this brutality is not history.
Violence in Darfur is cataclysmic. It displaces an average of 1Â 000 people each day. Almost 200Â 000 people have fled from their homes this year, adding to the swelling ranks of Darfur’s sprawling camps, where more than two million seek refuge. The humanitarian aid that keeps these people alive is under increasing threat. Aid workers say that there have been more hijackings of aid vehicles in the first half of 2008 than in the whole of last year.
Patrolling this misery is the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force (Unamid). Fashioned in the workshop of the UN Security Council a year ago this week, the force was meant to bring security to the people of Darfur. But a year since this decision was made — and more than six months since the force was deployed on the ground — little has changed for the people of Darfur. As the Darfur Consortium, a coalition of 50 African NGOs, says, Unamid is at risk of becoming the world’s latest broken promise on Darfur.
Painful testimonies punctuate the Darfur Consortium’s report on Unamid. Their voices should haunt the world leaders that can make a difference.
One woman implores: ”They say they will patrol when they get more soldiers and equipment. What good is that to us? We women are getting attacked now. Last week the Janjaweed took my friend while she collected wood. If they do patrols next year when they are ready, that will not bring her back.”
Another says: ”We have to go out to survive — to look for wood, or food, or jobs. Yet whenever we go out, people get beaten, or threatened, or killed. There is nobody protecting us.”
Their words are falling on deaf ears. The numbers of peacekeepers is still scarily small. Fewer than 10Â 000 soldiers of the 26Â 000 needed are patrolling Darfur, and just 600 troops are new, added this year. Many of the rest are brave AU soldiers who were already patrolling Darfur as a part of an earlier, failed peacekeeping initiative.
The force also lacks 20 helicopters and armoured vehicles needed to patrol effectively the vast region of Darfur, which is bigger than many African nations. In fact, the force is so under-resourced that former AU soldiers have resorted to painting their helmets blue to show that they are now a part of a UN mission and still drive around in vehicles emblazoned with their old force’s emblems.
But a critical lack of equipment and troops means that Unamid soldiers themselves — the protectors — are also becoming Darfur’s victims. On July 8, the deadliest attack on the force so far left seven African peacekeepers killed and others critically wounded. A few days later another was shot dead.
In the wake of the attack, General Martin Luther Agwai, the force commander of Unamid, said that tactical army helicopters could have prevented the slaughter of his soldiers as murderous militias hemmed them in. He desperately appealed for more troops. There cannot be a graver wake-up call to the international community than this.
I lived through 20 years of death and destruction in South Sudan. I don’t want to see my country strangled by another 20 years of war. But unless world leaders rise to the challenge, Darfur could be caught in a spiral of violence. Many will be in history’s dock if Unamid fails. The government of Sudan has been playing a callous game of semantics. It has refused some troop offers from countries such as Norway and Sweden, saying that the UN resolution authorising the force stipulates it will be of a ”mainly African character”.
I am all for African solutions to African problems, but it is clear that Africa can lead but not go it alone here — the people of Darfur need all the help they can get, no matter where it comes from. Even Agwai, the Nigerian commander, welcomes more troops and assistance from other countries. That the UN Security Council can allow such malicious misinterpretation of Unamid’s mandate by Sudan is the ultimate betrayal to the people of Darfur.
Unamid could make a real difference to the safety of the Darfuri population by setting up a more consistent presence in the camps and accompanying women as they go and collect firewood and trade in markets. If the human rights of people in Darfur mean anything to world leaders today, they must back up their mountain of words with concrete funding and equipment. Otherwise, what are they saying? That Darfuri people don’t matter? That they are somehow less than human? Because if the powerful break their promises as people are raped and villages are burnt, then that is exactly the message that they deliver.
Unamid is not the whole answer to Darfur — it was never meant to be. Alongside its deployment, heightened efforts are needed negotiate a ceasefire and reignite peace talks. But if the peacekeeping force fails in its early stages, Darfur’s peace will prove harder to find.
When I was a war child in South Sudan, it was only luck that saved me. Without the chance help of aid worker Emma McCune, I could have died. I want to load the dice to protect the people of Darfur, to tip the balance with peacekeepers to guard civilians from the violent excesses of war. The world has promised this much to Darfur. It is time that it delivered.
Emmanuel Jal is a Sudanese former child soldier who escaped southern Sudan to the refugee camps in Kenya, and later became a major international hip-hop star. His first album was a collaboration with northern Sudanese musicians to promote peace across the country. His second album, War Child, has just been released to international acclaim