Liz Walker in Darfur
February 2005

Across the world, women are taking the lead in advocating for peace. In 2005, Liz Walker, Host and Executive Producer of “Sunday with Liz Walker,” Linda Mason, and Gloria White Hammond visited Darfur Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. While Sudanese women are aggressively pursuing peace, the conditions in the camps are especially horrific for women. Below, Liz chronicles her experience with Sumira and other women at the Hesse Hissa IDP camp in West Darfur.

I will never forget Sumira standing there in the crowd behind the Mercy Corps truck, as we said our goodbyes to the women at the Hesse Hissa IDP camp in the Zalengie corridor of West Darfur. She said nothing, but there was desperate plea in her eyes as our truck pulled away. She held her hand to her heart, a gesture weighed down in a sadness that swept through the dusty silence between us. I met Sumira while shooting video of Darfuri women as they recounted the horror of their experiences in Western Sudan’s deadly conflict. I went to Darfur with Linda Mason and Gloria White Hammond to find out the needs of some of the women and children who are among the more than 2 million people forced to flee their homes in this massive campaign of ethnic violence. It is estimated that more than sixty thousand people live in the two sprawling IDP camps we visited. The camps are set up by humanitarian organizations as temporary refuge from this stubborn and vicious conflict. Since the violence broke out in 2003, as many as 300,000 lives have been lost. It’s difficult to get accurate figures on casualties here, but when pain stares you straight in the eye, numbers don’t seem to matter.

Sumira is in the first group of women who meet us in the community tukul, a large mud hut set aside as a gathering place in the heart of the IDP camp. Here, people meet for religious and social activities or discussions about the needs of the camp. Today, a group of women are huddled together outside the tukul kneading donkey dung and mud into clay pots that will be the base of fuel-efficient stoves. The women will cook on the stoves in their huts, cutting down on serious accidents and most importantly on the number of times they need to leave the camp searching for firewood, trips that can be violently dangerous and even deadly.

Inside the tukul eight village women have volunteered to talk to us. All of the women, veiled in rich vibrant colors, are cordial and friendly. With one hand on their hearts, they place the other one on our shoulders and greet us with “asalam a lakum” “sabah el kheir” translated as hello and good morning. I take out my video equipment as the women find places to sit on the dirt floor. Sumira is sitting in the back of the group, her head draped in a bright fuchsia hijab that is stunning against her caramel skin. Thick braids peak out from under the veil. She watches as I clumsily set up the camera. I smile. She shyly smiles back. I guess she’s in her twenties. She looks tired, but then all these women do. Life here is hard.

While these IDP camps offer the only hope for those fleeing the genocide in Darfur, they pose huge challenges. They continually grow as more people evade the fighting. Aid groups work desperately to dig enough wells and latrines to handle the swelling populations. Sanitation and hygiene problems result in life threatening diseases. Cholera and malaria have claimed thousands of lives. The only thing more plentiful than death in here is fear. We are warned by our Mercy Corps hosts to be discreet and guarded in our conversations with the women. Even inside the camps, people are not free from intimidation from the enemy. In Sudan, the enemy is everywhere and hard to identify. Gloria, Linda, and I have stayed up late into the night putting together innocuous questions. “Tell us about your family? What is it like to live in this place? What was life like before?”

The women are ready to talk. For some of them, this is the only opportunity to openly discuss what they’ve experienced. The first woman who speaks has a deep scar over her right eye. Her name is Sadijah. Our interpreter Munira translates, “The janjaweed came to my village and destroyed everything.” The term janjaweed is used to describe the government backed nomadic tribesmen who attack the villages on camel or horseback. Armed with automatic weapons, they usually strike in the early morning hours, burn the tukuls, steal the livestock, and kill the men. Sadijah watched as her husband and brother were murdered. She points to her scar. “A janjaweed hit me in my head with his gun when I tried to get to my husband. He dragged me away, and he raped me.” Sadijah’s is the first of three accounts of brutal rapes we hear among this first small group of women. Nearly half of the 60 women we interview during our three-day visit to the camps have been raped. Every story is more horrific than the one before. Many women recount savage gang rapes. One woman says she was raped two weeks after delivering her baby, who lay helplessly nearby while she was attacked. The memories are fresh and raw. The more I listen, the more I realize I have never been this close to the presence of evil in my life.

Rape is by far the most utilized tool of war in Darfur, a systematic weapon of genocide. It is used to degrade and dehumanize. It produces “bastard” babies, their unknown parentage blasphemy in a culture whose religion is grounded in the sanctity of family. The very existence of these innocent children can shame a family for generations. Rape is far more insidious and damaging than death by gunfire. For women in some more fundamentalist Islamic communities, it is a living death.

Sumira remained quiet through most of the interviews. She spent most of the time sitting quietly in the back of the group wiping her tears away with her veil. While every woman’s story was moving, there was something in Sumira’s silence that touched me deep down inside. When Gloria and Linda finished their interviews I turned the camera off and whispered to our other interpreter to ask Sumira if she would show me where she lived. She hesitated and then agreed. I didn’t realize at the time what a brave step she was taking. By leading me with my camera through the camp, Sumira would open herself up to all kinds of trouble; informants, jealous neighbors, the enemy. We set out down the path.

We walked for about half a mile. The IDP camps, located on the outskirts of villages, are made up of thousands of little cramped straw and stick huts with plastic sheeting for roofs. Despite the best efforts of humanitarian aid workers, the camps are breeding grounds for deadly violence and disease. They are built to provide temporary housing, but in Sudan, where war and displacement have been the rule for decades, many take on an atmosphere of permanence. The worst among them are squalid prisons without walls where the hopeless are buried alive. In the Darfur region, the camps are only a few years old. There is still room here for hope.

The camps are overrun with children. Large families are common in many African cultures where children symbolize wealth and provide manpower. As we make our way across the camp, little heads start popping up out of thin air. Layered in dust and easily coaxed into smiles for the camera, children are everywhere. They laugh and chase each other, play with sticks, and huddle together watching a lizard trapped in a plastic jug. They chase after me screaming Hawajie. The interpreter laughingly explains the word means “White man.” It’s a term the Darfur people use for all the aid workers. They say it with bright smiles. For me, being called white takes some getting used to. At first I want to yell back James Brown’s refrain, “No, I’m black and I’m proud!” But they say ‘Hawajie’ with such delight I laugh with them and repeat it “Hawajie!” Their innocence and authenticity almost make me forget where I am. Then I realize we are passing a cemetery. There are at least twenty fresh graves lined in little white pebbles, with larger rocks marking the head of each mound. The interpreter explains there are many gravesites like this all over the camp, too many graves I think for a temporary community. There are so many ways to die here.

As we walk I ask Sumira how she ended up in the camp. Through the interpreter she offers a detailed description of what must have been a systematic attack of her village. “Two trucks full of soldiers came early one morning before sunrise. They were shooting in the air and yelling. I woke up my children. My husband was outside with my brother. By the time I got the children outside, the soldiers were screaming at my husband. They shot him.” There was no time to help her husband. Sumira grabbed her children and headed toward the forest. That was when she heard the Antonov plane overhead. “The plane dropped one, maybe two, bombs. There was much screaming. Everything was on fire.” Thirteen members of Sumira’s family died that morning. With nothing but the clothes on her back and no destination in mind, she fled with her mother, her sister, and her three children, ages seven, five, and two. They hid in the forest without food for three days. Why were they attacked? “They take our land.” For generations, non-Arab farmers like Sumira’s family have cultivated sorghum, ground nuts, and fruits. Arab nomads have encroached on the farmers’ property, searching for increasingly difficult to find grazing land for their cattle. Clashes are inevitable. These clashes over land and livelihood, along with age-old tribal rivalries fan the flames of the violent conflict between the fundamentalist Islamic government and rebel groups fighting for autonomy and voice. While it is difficult to sort out the complexities of these conflicts, one thing is clear, women like Sumira are increasingly thrust into an unfamiliar and socially challenging role as the heads of their households. They are left trying to restore some order in a world that is out of their control.

Sumira and her family live in a tiny makeshift tukul about 3 feet by 5 feet, made of N.G.O. issued plastic sheeting over straw and sticks. Their hut is furnished with a couple of mats, which protect them from the sub-Saharan dirt floor, a couple of baskets and a few cooking utensils given to them by Mercy Corps. The day I visited, Sumira was heating hibiscus tea, a staple of Sudanese life. Her family’s food, consisting of cereal grain supplied by Mercy Corps, is supplemented periodically with a little goat, more gristle than meat, and some vegetables she buys with the money she makes from temporary work in the nearby village of Zalengie. The women in the camps hire out to wash clothes or clean homes and businesses. Work is scarce, because the town’s economy is so bad. Many of the villagers resent the IDPs because they get help and attention from humanitarian agencies that is not offered to surrounding communities. It is difficult to know who to trust and where to go safely. There are countless boogey men. The IDPs are targets for every disgruntled townsperson, nomad, or anybody with a grudge against the humanitarian efforts. Sumira and many other Darfuri women fear all men in uniform, because soldiers are often responsible for rapes. I ask Sumira if she has been attacked. “No,” she answers quietly, but she seems resigned to the possibility. She has heard that “the Janjaweed will rape all the women because we are dark and dirty. They [the Janjaweed] will make the children light.” Our humanitarian hosts have assured us that color and race are not factors in this conflict. Figuring out the truth here is like counting the deaths. It depends on who you talk to.

Sumira spends between two and three hours each day gathering limbs and twigs to use in her cooking fire and to sell in the market place. People in the IDP camps are desperate to find ways to support their families. Gathering firewood, like everything else is dangerous. Women are violently raped and beaten when they go out into the forest to get wood. Some women have tried to protect themselves by traveling in large groups, but even that has been dangerous. A group of a dozen women in another camp was hemmed in by armed bandits and severely beaten as they tried futilely to defend themselves. Despite their efforts, one of the women was dragged away from the group and never seen again. Sumira, like everybody else in the camp, has heard many stories like this. “I have to take care of my family.”

As Sumira leads me back to the community tukul where our group is ready to get into the truck and head back to our compound, we walk into a huge dust storm. These gritty squalls blow up all the time in this part of the world. Practically unnoticeable at the start, they are quickly fueled by their own momentum and get larger and larger. If you are caught in one, the only thing you can do is cover to your face, hold your breath and bend into the force of the wind. I think it helps to keep moving.

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