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| Africa: Horn |
| In Darfur with the Justice and Equality Movement |
| 2004-05-12 |
| EFL NORTH DARFUR, Sudan â Racing across the desert in a Toyota Land Cruiser, the Justice and Equality Movement rebel corps looks much like any other rag-tag African militia: all dark glasses, antique-looking guns, and bravado. But meet with their leaders under the trees of their base camp and a whole different picture emerges: The leadership is a group of thoughtful members of western Sudanâs intellectual community â professors, engineers, and other professionals who have become full-time soldiers to protect their people from genocide. âWe need to get our message out,â JEMâs vice secretary-general, Mohammed Saleh Hamid, said. âWe need help from the United States to stop Khartoum from killing our people and help us create democracy in Sudan. If they provide the ammunition, weâll change the government in Khartoum.â Good idea. When rebel groups like the Sudan Liberation Army, the nationâs largest group with 13,000 members, and JEM â which has about 8,000 in its ranks â began attacking government targets to show they were serious about change, the president provided a brutal reply. Sudan air force planes bombed villages in Darfur. The government made an alliance with an Arab nomadic tribe known as the Janjaweed and had them drive Darfurâs black Africans out of the region. Their effort to ethnically cleanse Darfur of its black Africans has been effective. A floating population numbering more than a million is drifting back and forth across the border between Sudan and Chad. Human rights officials say that more than 1,000 black Africans are dying a day in the violence. Not that anyone notices. I mean, naked pyramids! Few details about JEMâs leadership or what it hopes to achieve in fighting the Khartoum government have been released. The group has been linked, for example, to Hassan el-Turabi, a backer of Mr. bin Ladenâs. They claim that is misinformation from the Khartoum government. Mr. el-Tarabi fired one of the organizationâs key leaders in the 1990s, and they equate Mr. el-Tarabi with everything that is wrong with Sudanâs government. âHe was part of the government that was marginalizing the outskirts of Sudan,â said the vice secretary general, Mr. Mohammed. âSudan became a terrorist state at a time when el-Tarabi was in power. We deny his thinking. We want to establish a new Sudan. That was the old Sudan.â |
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