Sven Torfinn for The New York Times
People who fled the Darfur region of Sudan amid brutal attacks are coming back. A Darfurian in Nyuru, peacekeepers behind her.
The New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Darfur was long known for the brutality inflicted
upon its residents by militias, but peace has settled on the region. A
nomadic tribe got water at a well this month.
The millions of civilians who fled into camps, their homes often reduced
to nothing more than rings of ash by armed raiders, are among the most
haunting legacies of the conflict in Darfur, transforming this rural
landscape into a collection of swollen impromptu squatter towns.
And while the many thousands going home are only a small fraction of
Darfur’s total displaced population, they are doing so voluntarily,
United Nations officials say, offering one of the most concrete signs of
hope this war-weary region has seen in years.
“It’s amazing,” said Dysane Dorani, head of the United Nations peacekeeping
mission for the western sector of Darfur. “The people are coming
together. It reminds me of Lebanon after the civil war.”
If ever there was a ghost town, it was the village of Nyuru, on a
windswept hill in western Darfur, where countless people were gunned
down by men on horseback or stabbed with crude little daggers when this
region of Sudan exploded in bloodshed in 2003. After that, everybody
fled, and they stayed away for years.
But on a recent morning, thousands of Nyuru’s residents were back on
their land doing all the things they used to do, scrubbing clothes,
braiding hair, sifting grain and preparing for a joint feast of farmers
and nomads. Former victims and former perpetrators would later sit down
side by side together, some for the first time since Darfur’s war broke
out, sharing plates of macaroni and millet — and even the occasional
dance — in a gesture of informal reconciliation.
After all the years of international diplomacy, sanctions, billions of
dollars spent on peacekeepers and an extremely well-oiled advocacy
machine that elevated Darfur into a worldwide cause célèbre, attracting
the likes of George Clooney and Mia Farrow, parts of Darfur finally
appear to be turning around, for a few reasons.
The most obvious is that Sudan recently made peace with Chad,
securing a border that used to be crawling with proxy forces and
militiamen toting bazookas. Western aid groups are now trying to
capitalize on this, partially shifting away from emergency aid and
increasing funds for what they call “recovery,” providing brave pioneers
with all the essentials they need to go home and stay home, like seeds,
wells, plows and workshops to make plows. Even the death of Libya’s
dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has had ripples — good ripples,
people here say.
Colonel Qaddafi used to supply guns to Darfurian rebels, part of his
meddling across this patch of Africa. Now that he is gone, the rebels
are weaker, with some more in the mood to negotiate, as evidenced by a
recent peace treaty signed by one rebel faction.
Of course, all is not well in Darfur. More than two million people
remain stuck in internal displacement or refugee camps, and some rebel
groups fight on. But people who have been victimized and traumatized are
sensing a change in the air and acting on it, risking their lives and
the lives of their children to leave the relative safety of the camps to
venture back to where loved ones were killed.
Abdallah Mohamed Abubakir, a skinny farmer, just brought his family back to Nyuru.
“Things aren’t great,” he said, “but they’re getting better.”
A quick glance around Nyuru illuminates what he means. The village
school may be six sagging grass-walled huts — but it is a new school.
The village hospital is one large dusty tent — but it is also new, paid
for by an Islamic charity.
Not far away are smashed houses and traces of ash on the ground, the
footprints of the violence nine years ago, almost as if the land itself
was quietly saying: people were killed here, many, many people.
But, at the same time, there is a new police station standing on a hill,
with a fresh coat of high-gloss blue, and there are no reports of major
violence.
Until just a few weeks ago, the Abubakirs, like hundreds of thousands of
other Darfurians, had been living in Chad. They were essentially serfs,
renting a tiny spit of land and barely surviving off it. They fled to
Chad in 2003, when nomadic Arab militias sponsored by Sudan’s government
— the infamous janjaweed — rampaged the Darfurian countryside,
slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians who belonged to the same
ethnic groups as the Darfurian rebels.
But in the past few months, word began to trickle back to Chad that the
janjaweed were gone. The Abubakirs — Abdallah and his wife and their two
children — decided to pack up and return.
“And it’s true,” Mr. Abubakir said. “You can go out to the bushes and collect firewood and nobody bothers you.”
He added, “People are coming back every day.”
Nancy Lindborg, a top official with the United States Agency for
International Development, said, “We’re very optimistic about that
area.” A recent agency news release featured Nyuru, under the headline: “Darfur’s Window of Opportunity.”
François Reybet-Degat, the current head of the United Nations refugee
office in Sudan, said that more than 100,000 people returned home to
several different areas of Darfur in 2011, far more than in any year
before that.
“It’s an early sign of a bigger trend,” he said. “There are still
pockets of insecurity, but the general picture is that things are
improving.”
The United Nations will soon start organizing “go and see” visits for
refugees in Chad, he said, to scout out their home villages.
But some people may never want to go home. The optimism about the uptick
in returnees is checked by the sober realization that Darfur’s
sprawling displaced person camps — some virtual cities, with more than
100,000 people — will probably never totally disband.
Darfur’s conflict has destroyed not only innumerable lives but also a
whole way of life. Many villagers who fled into the camps to avoid
getting killed have stayed for nearly a decade and grown used to camp
services like schools, clean water, health clinics and cellphone
coverage —the very things missing from rural Darfur that planted the
seeds for resentment and rebellion in the first place.
Many will probably never go back to the harsh village life, and analysts
see the giant camps turning into the kind of permanent slums that ring
urban centers across Africa, from Kinshasa to Nairobi.
Darfur is “a quite different place from 2003,” said Dane Smith, the
American senior adviser for Darfur. He cited a telling statistic: In
2003, 18 percent of Darfur’s population lived in urban areas. Now it’s
about 50 percent.
The peace treaty signed in July between the Sudanese government and one
rebel faction, the Liberation and Justice Movement, outlined steps for
the compensation of war victims and the prosecution of murderers. But
while peace has taken root in some parts of Darfur, justice remains a
specter.
Many Arabs in Nyuru still call the massacres in 2003 an “accident” and speak of them in the passive voice.
“Something happened in the past, but it’s over now,” said Ahmed Ayam Orgas, an Arab leader.
It does not feel over for Nyuru’s victims. Down by the river is a
brickyard, where thick mud bricks bake in the sun. Nyuru never had a
brickyard before. Before the conflict, all the houses were made of
straw.
“But then the entire village was burned down by one match,” said Adam Hajar Omar, a sheikh.
He laughed a bitter, little laugh.
“We’ve learned our lesson,” he said.
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