[Mb-civic] Africa's Brutal Lebensraum By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Africa's Brutal Lebensraum
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

BILDIQ, Chad

The villagers in this hamlet of thatch-roof mud huts told me that they had
shot dead a member of the brutal janjaweed militia and pointed to his body.
I walked over to look at the corpse ‹ and his eyes opened.

He was a teenager, perhaps 16, shot down as he and four other raiders
attacked this village along the Chad-Sudan border. Most of these villages
near the town of Adé are unarmed, and it is easy for members of the Arab
janjaweed to kill, rape and pillage with impunity, while yelling racial
epithets against the black African tribes they attack. But someone in this
village had an AK-47 and used it to fend off the attack.

The boy on the ground was slight and wearing old and filthy clothes. He
followed me with his eyes for 10 seconds and then closed them, moaning
softly. He had been shot in the waist and could not move.

The janjaweed are the brutes, armed and paid by the Sudanese government, who
have engaged in a genocidal campaign to destroy villages of African tribes
in the Darfur region of Sudan. Now Sudan, encouraged by the feebleness of
the international community's response, is expanding the genocide by sending
the raiders to attack the same tribes in neighboring Chad.

The villagers vowed not to kill the boy (they were indignant that I thought
they might), and promised to turn him over to the government. And then they
showed me someone still more interesting: another captured janjaweed youth
who was able to tell his story.

This young man was tied up, not particularly harshly, in a hut. He had a
bloody gash on his forehead where he had been hit with a machete, and it
seemed he might lose his eye, but he was easily able to answer questions.

"My name is Isak Muhammad," he began. "I am 21 years old." Video of him, of
the boy who was shot and of other scenes from my journey along the
Chad-Sudan border, can be viewed here.

Video: The Captured Raider
An excerpt from "The Genocide Spreads," Nicholas D. Kristof's Op-Ed special
report. Watch the complete report.

Mr. Isak was not driven by racist abhorrence for the Wadai tribe of this
village, for he is a Wadai himself. He said a militia leader had simply
promised the raiders $250 if they succeeded in killing the sheik, as a way
to terrorize villagers and drive them away.

Where did the militia leader get his money? Almost certainly from the
Sudanese government.

The Sudanese authorities may not have the money to feed their people, but
they are spending lavishly on arming proxy forces to invade Chad, in hopes
of destabilizing tribes and installing a pro-Sudanese pawn as the leader of
Chad.

So the genocide is not just driven by hatred, but also by opportunistic
mercenaries. Consider the founder of the janjaweed, Sheik Musa Hilal, a
ferocious Arab nationalist who has shown particular vigor in slaughtering
members of the Zaghawa tribe. According to a longtime acquaintance of Mr.
Musa, the sheik's own mother is Zaghawa.

As in Rwanda or even during the Holocaust, racist ideologies sometimes
disguise greed, insecurity and other pathologies. Indeed, one of the
genocide's aims is to drive away African tribes to achieve what Hitler
called Lebensraum: "living space" for nomadic Arabs and their camels.

So this village is simply a window into an entire region drenched in fear.
Men walk about carrying homemade spears and machetes, and parents tie
amulets around their children's necks.

As we left the village, I met a search party looking for six men who had
disappeared after an attack by other raiders. "We heard gunshots over there
a couple of minutes ago," said one man, pointing to a nearby hill. "We'll
wait two hours and then go over and see who was shot."

As the local county leader, Saudi Hassan, puts it, "The janjaweed are using
humans as targets ‹ they kill a person as if he were a chicken." Whether the
offenders are Nazis or Hutu extremists or Sudan's janjaweed, that is a crime
not only against the victims but also against all humanity. You can get
ideas about what you can do at www.savedarfur.org, the Web site of the Save
Darfur Coalition, which is planning a major rally on the Washington Mall on
April 30.

It is brutally demoralizing for people in these villages to be hunted down
as if they were wild beasts, to have their children pulled from their arms
and thrown into burning huts. But we should be just as demoralized by our
own indifference. The shame belongs not to the good people of Darfur and
Chad, but to ourselves.

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