Squabble Over Word Obscures Sudan Violence

In a sad, singsong voice, Fatima Juma tells how she lost everything. Her story is like thousands of others in Darfur. They came on camels and horses, she says. Running, she looked back and saw the village ablaze. She never saw the faces of the attackers but calls them the “janjaweed.”

Five months later, Juma, 47, lives in a rough shack of sticks and straw in the Kalma displaced persons’ camp near Nyala in South Darfur with her few remaining belongings -- a pot, a tin bowl, a precious piece of soap and her family’s food-ration cards, which are wrapped carefully in plastic and stuffed into a crack in the roof.

Juma wants justice, but doesn’t really expect it. Like many victims of attacks in Darfur, she does not know where the attackers came from, what their names were or who their leaders were.

All she saw of the men who stormed the village of Wadi Gara was horses and dust on the horizon. She cannot say exactly what she means by janjaweed. Her daughter, Fatima Abaker, 17, widowed in the attack, cuts in.

“It’s Arabs,” she said. “It means that everybody who stole our things and made problems for us is an Arab.”

Arab militiamen on camels and horses and dressed in military fatigues have killed an estimated 70,000 people and displaced more than 1.5 million from their villages, according to the United Nations. In the minds of the survivors of the attacks, there is no doubt who the killers were: janjaweed.

But it is often difficult -- on the surface at least -- to tell just who they are and where they have gone.

A few months back, militias described as janjaweed sauntered through the towns of Darfur without fear. Now they tend to dress in white robes and conceal their guns, resembling ordinary Arab herders with their camels, ranging through villages where indigenous African tribal people once lived and farmed.

Others have donned the uniforms of police or the Popular Defense Force, the government’s official counterinsurgency paramilitary group.

The word janjaweed means different things to different people. The term, traditionally used to refer to bandits and criminals, is a combination of Arabic words that convey the idea of evil gunmen on horseback. But as Darfur’s refugees use it to describe the pro-government Arab militias who attacked their villages, the word has been adopted by the international community.

Human rights groups and analysts argue that the Sudanese government has exploited this ambiguity to avoid disarming the militias responsible for crimes against humanity in Darfur. They say that many in the international community have become confused about who the janjaweed are and have failed to press Sudan to disarm militias and prosecute their leaders.

The Sudanese government’s initial response to international pressure was to prevent access to Darfur and deny that such militias existed. Then, playing on the traditional definition of janjaweed, they called them bandits and criminals over whom they had no control.

“It’s definitely government policy to sow confusion about the nature of the various forces in Darfur,” said John Prendergast, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. “And by using the term [janjaweed] that has historically been associated with elements that were criminal in nature, they have ... successfully diverted much of the pressure and attention off of the government’s own culpability in organizing and arming elements of the armed groups in Darfur.

“So far, that strategy has paid off.”

Jemera Rone of Human Rights Watch, speaking by phone from El Fasher in northern Darfur, said the Sudanese government had “created the ambiguity to suit their diplomatic purposes.”

“There are elaborate explanations about how [the janjaweed] are bandits out of their control,” Rone continued. “It’s just part of their game to try to deceive the diplomats of the Security Council.”

The Sudanese government, according to the U.S. State Department and other Western governments, has close links to the Arab militias. The U.N. has threatened oil sanctions against Sudan if it fails to disarm them and called for an international investigation into whether genocide has been taking place, as the U.S. State Department has alleged.

When 40 men described by authorities as janjaweed were convicted with fanfare recently in Nyala, they turned out to be common criminals who had no part in the attacks of the last year and a half, according to many media reports.

Mawlanna Mahjoob Mukhtar Ibrahim, the judge who sentenced the men, said it was difficult to find the attackers.

“They run away into the jungles and mountains. They’re just criminals, and that is the real meaning of janjaweed.”

Diplomats in Khartoum, the capital, described the situation as murky.

“There are many gangs or groups that [the Sudanese government] doesn’t control or who may be partly under their control or controlled by the local authorities,” one Western diplomat said. “So this is not a clear-cut picture. That makes you understand how difficult [disarming them] is logistically.”

But Prendergast and Rone said that international diplomats had bought the Sudanese line.

“The difference between the diplomats in Khartoum and the refugees, with respect to their perceptions of what the janjaweed are, are enormous,” Prendergast said. “The Europeans are shameful almost across the board in terms of their perception of the situation in Darfur.”

Prendergast said the Sudanese government had worked hard to convince Europe and the Arab world that it had no control over the forces attacking the villages in Darfur.

“It’s disingenuous but again, if you have diplomats that don’t know who these people are, then they get away with it. And the U.N. has somewhat bought into this rather than saying, ‘How can we punish the government for its clear culpability and chain of command with respect to janjaweed military activity?’ ”

Rone said the argument over the janjaweed terminology was “a convenient excuse for people who don’t want to deal with the truth. I am not talking about the U.S. and European Union so much as countries like Algeria and Pakistan. They very happily latch on to this word game. They echo the government and say that this government can’t control the bandits.”

One tribal leader identified by U.S. officials as a janjaweed leader, Musa Hilal, has admitted in press interviews that he answered a government call last year to defend the country against the rebels, summoning thousands of tribesmen to fight. But he has said they joined legal government forces.

“Janjaweed means nothing, but it is a word used to encompass all evil, a convenient way for Americans to understand who are the good guys and who are the bad,” Hilal told Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite television channel. “When the rebellion began last year, the government approached us and armed us. My sons were armed by the government and joined the Border Intelligence. Some tribesmen joined the Popular Defense Force.”

Rone said Hilal recently had told her the government had not asked him to disarm his army. Prendergast said enough was known about Hilal’s presence at the scene of attacks that he should be arrested, along with other militia leaders.

Prendergast said it would be impossible to prosecute fighters in individual attacks but that an international inquiry called for by the U.N. Security Council could establish links between government officials and Arab militias that could form the basis for war crimes prosecutions.

He said the international community had backed down “across the board” on demands to protect civilians in Darfur for fear of jeopardizing humanitarian access.

“The U.N. has lost sight of the endgame here. It’s very typical of the international community’s response to mass atrocities anywhere in the world: ‘We’re very bad at stopping them, but we’re very good at cleaning up afterwards with humanitarian assistance.’ ”