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Sevunts.com
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Suleiman Jamous once dreamt of immigrating to Canada and working at a paper mill. Today, the former paper technology engineer is a rebel leader in the desolate, windswept region of Darfur, western Sudan. He is the humanitarian affairs co-ordinator for the Sudanese Liberation Movement, the political arm of the Sudanese Liberation Army, one of two main rebel groups in Darfur. A tall, gaunt man of 57 who wears a turban made from camouflage netting, Jamous is the number-three man in the SLA/SLM's northern Darfur pecking order. Between 2000 and 2003, he spent 19 months in Sudanese jails, including three in solitary confinement in Port Sudan. "I was politically active in the SLM," Jamous says, sitting under a makeshift canopy in this abandoned village. "But they never caught me red-handed." Last October, he fled Khartoum, where most of his nine children still live and study, to openly join the rebels. "I'm giving the rest of my life to the SLM," Jamous says. It's not a life for the fainthearted. In the past 16 months, between 30,000 and 50,000 people have died in Darfur and more than 1 million have been displaced. As a growing African rebel movement in Darfur, the SLM has become a prime target of the Sudanese government of dictator Omar al-Bashir, who has unleashed the ferocity of both his army and an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed to crush the movement. Under international pressure, the Bashir government continues to deny direct involvement but has promised the U.N. it will do all it can to rein in the marauding militia by the end of the month. For the people here, however, Bashir's promise rings hollow. And their anxiety and hardship continue. There is no electricity. Water is carried in animal skins from nearby wells. And the menu consists of one dish only - go, a paste made of millet or maize flour accompanied by an onion sauce. Occasionally, when SLA soldiers manage to kill an antelope, they get to eat meat. To confer with rebel commanders Jamous usually calls a meeting in his "office," under one of the trees in the dry streambed known as a wadi. These days, Jamous spends his time worrying about getting humanitarian assistance for the civilians in the SLA-controlled areas, and weapons and ammunition for the SLA's ragtag troops. "We have about 600,000 civilians living in the areas under our control," Jamous says. But it's a number that's hard to verify. There has been no reliable census data in Sudan for years. And despite the presence of the SLA troops, who roam the countryside with heavy machine guns mounted in the back of their pickup trucks, most civilians are too terrified of the Sudanese army to return to their villages from hiding places in the hills and deserts. Those who do show up at wells - filling goatskins with water for families in hiding - speak of misery and impending hunger. Muhammad Abdurahim Ishag, a stocky peasant who looks 20 years fitter than his 65, says his family has been surviving on wild herbs and makhet, a pea-like fruit the locals eat when they have nothing else. Some women have made forays close to government-controlled cities to buy food, says Ishag, watching his youngest son filling goatskins with water. "The government doesn't allow any food to leave the cities, so our friends smuggle food out and sell it to us outside the cities." Men can't go anywhere near the cities, Jamous explains. "They'll get killed by the Janjaweed. Women would be beaten up or raped if they are caught buying food; men will be simply slaughtered." But even makhet is in short supply this year and Ishag reckons that if he doesn't receive any humanitarian assistance soon, he, his four wives and 25 children will go hungry in about two weeks. The needs of the SLA troops are equally pressing. "We need SAMs (surface to air missiles) to shoot down the Antonovs," Jamous says, speaking of the Soviet-built attack planes that have been used against them and civilian populations by the Sudanese government. "We need anti-tank weapons. We need ammunition." But the only pieces of modern technology available to the rebels are their ubiquitous Thuraya satellite phones. All the rest - beat-up Toyota Landcruisers and Chinese-made AK-47s and RPG-7 shoulder-launched grenades, Belgian and German assault rifles - are long past their due date. And although the rebels can get an exact GPS position with their Thuraya phones, the function is useless in the field because they don't have a single map to help navigate or plan operations. Jamous pulls out an old Sudanese high school geography textbook to show me the areas controlled by the rebels. The SLA soldiers lack the most basic military training and skills to properly care for the antiquated weaponry they have captured from the Sudanese army. In our travels in Darfur, we were accompanied by a group of 10 SLA soldiers in an ancient, open-top Toyota Landcruiser. It had a DShK 12.7mm machine gun mounted on a tripod in the back and a lighter PK 7.62mm machine gun tied to the front. A loaded RPG-7 - a powerful weapon in skilful hands - hung from the passenger side mirror, banging into every tree stump and stone we drove by. A sack of spare RPGs hung just by the passenger door. The grenades in the sack were so bent and bruised that none of them looked as if it was still good. The soldiers were individually armed with an assortment of Chinese-made AK-47s and one obsolete American M14 rifle that jammed after every shot. Though we drove hundreds of kilometres through the desert, it never occurred to the soldiers to cover the machine guns to prevent dust and sand from entering their barrels. Every other SLA cruiser we met had the same set-up. By the end of the trip, the RPG was covered in a centimetre-deep layer of dried mud and its sights were damaged from the constant banging. With that RPG-7, the SLA soldiers wouldn't be able to hit the wide side of a barn from 50 metres, let alone a moving tank. The only target practice they got was the occasional stop to hunt antelopes and large birds the size of Canada geese. They missed routinely because none of the soldiers knew how to adjust the sights to compensate for the distance to the target. The deputy commander of SLA forces, 27-year-old university dropout Jiddo Issa, admits that the SLA has only six professional military officers. Dressed in civilian clothes, with only a pistol holster around his waist to indicate his military status, Issa looks more like a student than a warlord. Although he now commands an army, he has never done any military service beyond a rudimentary course every Sudanese boy must take in high school. All his skills have been learned in actual combat. But whatever SLA soldiers lack in weapons and training, they make up for in their willingness to protect their villages, or die trying. "This is because we have an aim in this fight and we have no choice," says Issa, sitting cross-legged with Jamous under a large, thorny tree. "You either fight to live or flee and be killed." The Sudanese army, on the other hand, has no will to fight, he says. "Many of the soldiers were forced to fight against our troops. And the Janjaweed, they're only interested in stealing livestock and they kill to steal." From its humble beginnings in August 2001, the SLA has grown into a truly popular movement, a peasant army. "We were in a place called Abugamra, about 70 kilometres south of Karnoy, when the government forces attacked us," Issa says of Aug. 1, 2001. "We had only 21 rifles, now we have an army that is capable of fighting the Sudanese army face to face. It's difficult, but we've learned to destroy their tanks and big guns. The only thing we have no weapons against are the Sudanese planes." Jamous says the uprising grew out of resentment for the government campaign of forced Arabization carried out by successive regimes in Khartoum. "They have gathered landless Arabs from Chad, Mali, Niger and Central African Republic, promising to settle them in the lands of the African people of Darfur. "This has been going on since 1982, when the first cases of ethnic cleansing started in the Fur regions. "The government then denied responsibility, blaming it on tribal conflicts. But we knew who was behind the killings and the burning of the villages." The brutal campaign by the Sudanese army and Janjaweed to suppress the current uprising in Darfur only flooded the SLA with thousands of volunteers willing to kill and die to protect their families or to avenge those who had already been killed. "In 2001, the army massacred 57 civilians in a place called Tuel," Jamous says. "So, the whole area was angry and joined the SLA. The news spread that the government was killing even innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the SLA." He says the SLA also attracts many people who are unhappy with the political and economic marginalization of the non-Arab population. For many non-Arab Sudanese, he says, fighting has become the only way of achieving a political change in the country. Jamous is a perfect example of what drove thousands in Darfur, one of Sudan's most underdeveloped areas, to take up arms against the government. A graduate of the University of Alexandria in Egypt, he speaks perfect Arabic. He worked at a paper-producing company, was employed by the government and set up his own business. But as a Zaghawa - a member of one of Sudan's African tribes - he was never allowed to rise above a certain position in society, he says. "Sudan has been ruled by a clique of Arab elites. All the development - economic projects, health care and education - has been concentrated in Arab areas, but they represent only 15 per cent of Sudan's population. "We want to change that. We want equality, we want development - electricity, clean water, roads, schools. We want democracy." The SLA's insistence on such broad political and economic changes has been a major sticking points in negotiations with Khartoum, Jamous says. SLA leaders don't expect the current ceasefire, negotiated in N'Djamena, Chad, in April, to hold forever. Indeed, the SLA accuses the government of routine, ongoing violations. The rebels even admit that the SLA could launch another offensive if peace talks scheduled for this week go nowhere. Militarily, the ceasefire puts the SLA at a disadvantage. While the Sudanese army has been rearming with the help of other Arab countries and has bought new jet fighters and attack helicopters, Jamous says, the SLA has received no foreign assistance. "Not even a spoon," he says. Fighting has been the SLA's main source of acquiring new weapons. And one battle, in particular, proved that the SLA could butt heads with the Sudanese army, Jamous says, as he drives us to a plateau about 20 kilometres west of Amaray. The plateau, with a pile of enormous boulders in the centre, is called Gourbou Jong. In July and August last year, SLA troops attacked a well-dug-in Sudanese army force that was marauding villages in the area. Several mass graves contain what Jamous says are the remains of young Zaghawa men taken away by the Sudanese army and executed here. "This was a pure army camp," Jamous insists, taking a GPS reading from his Thuraya phone to mark the exact location of the mass grave. "There were no Janjaweed here." He points to a n Arabic sign painted in white on a boulder and says it marks the place where a Sudanese army general was killed. Behind the rock formation is the wreckage of two army ammunition trucks, blown up by the rebels. Unexploded howitzer and mortar shells litter the ground around the twisted remains of the trucks. It was the SLA's mini-Stalingrad - the battle in which they learned they could face the Sudanese head-to-head and win. "Our troops came in from three directions," Jamous says. "There were about 6,000 Sudanese troops and we attacked them with 2,000 men." It's hard to believe 6,000 men could fit here unless they were packed like sardines. The abandoned contours of Sudanese trenches around the boulders indicate that a battalion, reinforced with field artillery - about 600 men in all - was dug-in here. It was an unimaginative, textbook position that left the Sudanese forces exposed and cut off from the wadi and its well water. In one place, a dutifully dug position has a large mound barely 50 metres in front of it, obscuring the field of fire. "They threw at us everything they had tanks, helicopters, jet fighters, Antonovs," Jamous says. "This was the battle that gave confidence to our troops and gave us the highest morale to stand against government troops." Then in January, the SLA adopted a brilliant strategy that eventually left it in control of most of northern Darfur. The SLA decided to sacrifice three urban centres it was defending to gain greater mobility in the countryside, Jamous says. "Instead of staying in one area, we told civilians to either defend themselves or cross into Chad. "We then opened new areas in southern and southeastern Darfur and strengthened our positions in Jebel Marrah." The Sudanese forces celebrated their apparent victory for a week, Jamous says, until they realized that the SLA was now threatening to capture the provincial capital of Nyala, in southern Darfur. To save Nyala from falling into rebel hands and to reinforce its positions in Jebel Marrah, he says, the Sudanese government was forced to pull out most of its army from northern Darfur. If new fighting breaks out, the SLA is confident it can recapture the cities of Tine, Karnoy and Ambaru, the ones it abandoned in January. That, Jamous says, would leave his forces in almost total control of northern Darfur. "Then, God willing, we'll march on Khartoum." Levon Sevunts is a Canadian freelance journalist filing to the Star from Africa. |
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© 2009 Levon Sevunts. All rights reserved. |