العدالة لأهل دارفور قبل السلام ... المدعي العام لمحكمة الجنايات الدولية سيصدر لائحة المتهمين

Quote: VI. The Perpetrators' Point of View A few days later, I drove to Tama with African Union officers and troops. Their mandate is a cruel one in that they are nearly powerless; they must monitor the cease-fire, and that's it, no peacekeeping. Which means that many of these men — Rwandans, Gambians, South Africans, Kenyans, Nigerians — have spent the last year picking up and burying hundreds of dead bodies, and even watching as janjaweed burn and shoot. And they can do nothing. In Tama the fires hadn't yet gone out. Flames shot out of the freshly harvested sorghum and sesame. Ceramic storage vats of food were smoldering. Homes were ransacked. Empty toothpaste boxes, notebooks, onions and okra spilled across the floors. A dog lay dead outside the smashed basins of the midwife's house. Inside the brick mosque the floor was clean but for a bloodied turban, a bloodied djellaba, a few bullet casings and two aluminum boxes holding Korans. "This is the Islam of Sudan," said a young Fur man, a Muslim. A sheik from the village showed us the graves outside the mosque where they buried 10 men and a woman. A week had passed since the janjaweed first attacked, and still they were burning the place to ensure that the villagers wouldn't come back. The governor of South Darfur, Atta al-Mannan, explained Tama to me this way: "I warned the A.U. that this is the seasonal trip south of the nomads and there may be an accident." But according to a military-intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared he would be killed, the Sudanese military knew the janjaweed were going to attack Tama. The janjaweed, he said, are considered legal and are mostly part of Border Intelligence Guard units. "They picked up boxes of ammunition at 2 p.m. the day before," he said. "So we knew some attack was coming. That is the usual routine." Sudan's rulers seem to contemplate the murderous violence that sustains their power with complete serenity. One evening in Khartoum I visited the former governor of South Darfur, Lieut. Gen. Adam Hamid Musa. We sat in his garden during Ramadan, accompanied by a professor friend of his. Hamid Musa lived in a residential area cordoned off for favored military officers. He was removed as governor in 2004 and now ######### the Darfur Peace and Development Forum, which is financed by Sudan's ruling party. He suggested that talk of rapes and racial cleansing in Darfur was simple propaganda. "Do you think a governor will go to kill his own people?" he asked. Even before he was made governor in 2003, Musa was part of a group of Arab ideologues who were in Darfur recruiting Arab nomads into the militia now known as the janjaweed. In the garden that night, he noted that the allegations of rape and slaughter all came from the tribes of victims. "And they all lied?" I asked. "Yes," he said. "A single case of raping hasn't been proved. The women there don't even know what the word means." He chuckled happily and popped a toffee into his mouth, as did his professor friend.