The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (2 page)

Our Land Cruiser was suddenly blocked by six trucks that emerged from a maze of desert bushes. These were Land Cruisers, too, but with their roofs cut off completely so men could pile in and out instantly, as when they have to escape a losing battle or get out before a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) reaches them. Dusty men with Kalashnikov rifles piled out. On the order of their commander, they pointed their guns at us. When so many guns are pulled ready at the same time, the crunching sound is memorable. We moved slowly out of our vehicle with our hands raised.

These men were clearly rebel troops: their uniforms were but dirty jeans; ammunition belts hung across their chests; their loosely wrapped turbans, or
shals
—head scarves, really—were caked with the dust of many days’ fighting. No doctors travel with these troops, who fight almost every day and leave their friends in shallow graves.
Emotionally, they are walking dead men who count their future in hours. This makes them often ruthless, as if they think everyone might as well go to the next life with them. Many of them have seen their families murdered and their villages burned. You can imagine how you would feel if your hometown were wiped away and all your family killed by an enemy whom you now roam the land to find and kill so you can die in peace.

Among the rebels are the Sudan Liberation Movement, the Sudan Liberation Army, the Justice and Equality Movement, and several others. There are other groups in Chad, and they travel across the borders as they please. Where they get their guns and money is often a mystery, but Darfur has been filled with automatic weapons from the time when Libya attacked Chad and used Darfur as a staging area. Also, it must be understood that Sudan is aligned with radical Islamic groups and is, as a separate matter, letting China get most of its oil. So some Western interests and some surrounding countries are thought to be involved in supporting the rebel groups. It is sad how ordinary people suffer when these chess games are played.

Nearly half of Africa is covered by the pastoral lands of herding villages, and much of this land has great wealth below and poor people above. They are among the three hundred million Africans who earn less than a dollar a day, and who are often pushed out of the way or killed for such things as oil, water, metal ore, and diamonds. This makes the rise of rebel groups very easy. The men who stopped us probably needed no persuasion to join this group.

The men’s weary-looking young commander walked to me and said in the Zaghawa language, “Daoud Ibarahaem Hari, we know all about you. You are a spy. I know you are Zaghawa like us, not Arab, but unfortunately we have some orders, and we have to kill you now.”

It was easy for him to know I was a Zaghawa from the small scars that look like quotation marks and were cut into my temples by my grandmother when I was an infant. I told him yes, I am Zaghawa, but I am no spy.

The commander breathed in a sad way and then put the muzzle of his M-14 rifle to one of these scars on my head. He asked me to hold still and told Philip to stand away. He paused to tell Philip in broken English not to worry, that they would send him back to Chad after they killed me.

“Yes, fine, but just a sec,” Philip replied, holding his hand up to stop the necessary business for a moment while he consulted me.

“What is going on?”

“They think I am a spy, and they are going to shoot the gun and it will make my head explode, so you should stand away.”

“Who are they?” he asked.

I told him the name of the group, nodding carefully in the direction of a vehicle that had their initials hand-painted on the side.

He looked at the vehicle and lowered his hands to his hips. He looked the way the British look when they are upset by some unnecessary inconvenience. Philip wore a
well-wrapped turban; his skin was tanned and a little cracked from his many adventures in these deserts. He was not going to stand by and lose a perfectly good translator.

“Wait just a moment!” he said to the rebel commander. “
Do… not… shoot… this… man
. This man is not a spy. This man is my translator and his name is Suleyman Abakar Moussa of Chad. He has his papers.” Philip thought that was my name. I had been using that name to avoid being deported from Chad to a certain death in Sudan, where I was wanted, and to avoid being otherwise forced to stay in a Chad refugee camp, where I could be of little service.

“I hired this man to come here; he is not a spy. We are doing a film for British television. Do you understand this? It’s absolutely essential that you understand this.” He asked me to translate, just to be sure, which, under my circumstance, I was happy to do.

More than his words, Philip’s manner made the commander hesitate. I watched the commander’s finger pet the trigger. The gun muzzle was hot against my temple. Had he fired it recently, or was it just hot from the sun? I decided that if these were about to be my last thoughts, I should try some better ones instead. So I thought about my family and how I loved them and how I might see my brothers soon.

“I am going to make a telephone call,” Philip explained, slowly withdrawing his satellite phone from his khaki pants pocket. “You will not shoot this man, because your commander will talk to you on this telephone momentarily— you understand?” He looked up a number from his pocket
notebook. It was the personal number of the rebel group’s top commander. He had interviewed him the previous year.

“Your top man,” he said to all the gunmen standing like a firing squad around us as he waited for the call to go through. “Top man. Calling his personal number now. It’s ringing. Ringing and ringing.”

God is good. The satellite phone had a strong signal. The number still worked. The distant commander answered his own phone. He remembered Philip warmly. Miracle after miracle.

Philip talked on the phone in a rapid English that I quietly translated for the man holding the gun.

Philip held one finger up as he spoke, begging with that finger and with his eyes for one more moment, one more moment. He laughed to show that he and the man on the phone were old friends.

“They are old friends,” I translated.

Philip then held out the satellite phone to the commander, who pressed the muzzle even harder against my head.

“Please talk to him now. Please. He says it’s an order for you to talk to him.”

The commander hesitated as if it were some trick, but finally reached over and took the phone. The two commanders talked at length. I watched his trigger finger rise and fall like a cobra and then finally slither away. We were told to leave the country immediately.

To not get killed is a very good thing. It makes you
smile again and again, foolishly, helplessly, for several hours. Amazing. I was not shot—
humdallah. My brothers, you will have to wait for me a little longer
.

Our driver had been wide-eyed through all this, since drivers often do not fare well in this kind of situation. There was joy and some laughter in the Land Cruiser as we sped back toward the village of Tine—which you say “Tina”—on the Chad-Sudan border.

“That was amazing what you did,” I said to Philip. We drove a few trees farther before he replied.

“Amazing, yes. Actually, I’ve been trying to get through to him for weeks,” he said. “Lucky thing, really.”

The driver, who spoke almost no English, asked me what Philip had said. I told him that he had said
God is good
, which, indeed, is what I believe he was saying.

Philip asked me if my name was Daoud or Suleyman. I told him that I was Daoud when in the Darfur regions of Sudan, but I was Suleyman in Chad. I explained my situation.

“Everyone has lots of names around here,” was his reply. He asked what I preferred to be called. Daoud, please, though many of my close friends also call me David, which is where Daoud comes from in the Bible. I asked him for the commander’s phone number, which he read to me.

We crossed back into Chad and moved up along the border, then came back into Darfur farther north. It would be worth our trouble not to run into that same rebel group again. But, one way or another, we would get the story for Philip, and Philip would get it out to the world. You have to be stronger than your fears if you want to get anything done in this life.

The problem in dealing with rebel groups is that it is often difficult to know who is on which side on any given day. The Arab government in Khartoum—the government of Sudan—makes false promises to make temporary peace with one rebel group and then another to keep the non-Arab people fighting one another. The government makes deals with ambitious commanders who are crazy enough to think the government will promote them after the war, when in fact they will be discarded if not killed then. These breakaway commanders are sometimes told to attack other rebel groups, or even to kill humanitarian workers and the troops sent from other countries to monitor compliance with cease-fire treaties. This is done so the genocide can carry on and the land can be cleared of the indigenous people. History may prove me wrong in some of these perceptions, but this is how it seems to most people who are there.

It is also believed that the government pays some of the traditional Arab people, many tribes of whom are otherwise our friends, to form deadly horseback militias called the Janjaweed to brutally kill the non-Arab Africans and burn our villages. The word
Janjaweed
may be from an ancient word meaning “faith warriors,” or it may be a combination of words meaning “evil spirits on horses,” or, some believe, it just means “gunmen on horseback.”

This is my prediction: When the government has removed or killed all the traditional non-Arabs, then it will get the traditional Arabs to fight one another so they too will disappear from valuable lands. This is already happening in areas where the removal of non-Arab Africans is nearly complete.

“So why did you come back home to Darfur just in time for this war?” Philip asked me over the roar of the Land Cruiser as we again bounced through wadis and over sand banks.

“A very good question!” I shouted back to him with a laugh.

On a day when you come so close to death, you should think about what you are doing here. Yes, you have a job to do in this place, but maybe you are also a little crazy to be here when you could be far away. But death had been chasing me for a long time now, from when I was thirteen and the world lit up around me, and I first saw men flying in pieces above me.

Here is that story. I was finishing my afternoon chores and thinking about the coming night of playing our village games,
Anashel
and
Whee
, rough-and-tumble sports played on the moonlit sand. Twenty government troop trucks suddenly surrounded our village. The commander gathered everyone from the village and organized the beating of some of the village men—quite old men—and demanded to know the precise whereabouts of the younger men who were presumed to be hiding in the hills with the resistance groups. That in fact was where they were, but the old men did not know exactly where they were, so the commander soon realized that the beatings were useless. He burned six huts to make his point.

Changes in the weather had forced the Arab nomads to graze their animals farther south into Zaghawa lands. In the past they would have asked permission, and a few camels might have changed hands. If no bargain could be
reached, and if they used the water and the grass anyway, a challenge would be made for a battle of honor on a traditional battlefield, far from any village. After that fight, the matter would be considered settled and the Arabs and the Zaghawa would immediately be friends again, dining in one another’s homes.

What was different now was that the Arab government of Sudan, because it wanted the more settled people off the land, was taking sides with the Arab nomads and providing some with guns, helicopters, bombers, and tanks to decide the arguments. This had driven many of the young Zaghawa men to join resistance groups. The Sudanese Army commanders were now going from village to village, looking for these fighters, telling the women to make their men turn in their weapons or else see their homes burned. Pressure was also being put on the people to move into the towns and cities “where they would be safe.” If they did this, however, they would live in the most severe kind of poverty.

The commander had grabbed me and two of my cousins to be his translators, since he knew that we were of school age and that all students were forced to learn some Arabic, which is what he spoke. If they caught you speaking Zaghawa in the schools, or not knowing your Arab words, they would use camel whips on you. The commander stood us up on the running board of his truck and made us say all his orders about giving up weapons. The women were crying and begging the soldiers to stop the beatings and let the children run away.

Often such commanders would shoot a few people to
emphasize the seriousness of the matter. In many instances, whole villages were burned. But this commander was not that strict. He told the three of us children that we must show them the way to a village he needed to visit next. We did not want to go with him, because, unlike the women and the old men who were being beaten, we knew the village defenders were in the steep wadi beyond the village waiting to attack these trucks. But we were pushed into the front seat of the first truck and were soon speeding out of the village.

Suddenly, there were painfully loud explosions all around us and machine-gun fire everywhere as the trucks came to a halt and the soldiers streamed out to find positions. We screamed from the window, “We are here! We are here! It’s us!” The commander pulled us out and used us as shields as he ran into the bushes. We put our faces close to the sand and the RPG rounds exploded into some of the trucks, sending any stragglers into the sky with trails of smoke and red mists of blood. The furious gunfight seemed to go on forever, but it was actually just a few minutes: guerrilla fighters always withdraw quickly to fight another day. When the shooting stopped, the commander stood and looked down at us.

“I think you helped make a trap for me,” he said, waving his pistol in our faces. We waited to die. He looked at us and, shaking his head, mumbled something we could not make out because our hearing had been hurt badly by the explosions. He then simply walked over to his men. They collected their dead and wounded and drove away in
their working trucks. We ran back to the village, yelling, “We are here!” in case the defenders were still in the bushes. Our mothers and sisters greeted us, crying, dancing around us and saying so many times,
Humdallah! Thank you, God!