Global Policy Forum

By Marc Lacey

Hawa Muhammad, 15, lost just about everything when the men on horseback came. They took her family's horses, donkeys and small herd of goats and sheep. They took her cooking pots and her clothing. They took her mother and her father, too. "The men on horses killed my parents," she said, referring to the Janjaweed, loose bands of Arab fighters. "Then the planes came." Now it is she to whom her six younger sisters turn when their bellies rumble. She recounted her tale as if in a trance.

Hawa left her village on the run and settled with thousands of others at the camp in Kalma, outside Nyala, part of a tide of a million people that the United Nations and others say has been displaced in this vast region of western Sudan. The government in Khartoum has closed the region to outsiders for much of the last year. Hawa's account of how the attack unfolded is the same as those heard in camp after camp across Darfur, as well as the settlements across the border in the desert of eastern Chad, where the United Nations estimates another 100,000 villagers have streamed.

Many were driven away by the Janjaweed, a few thousand uniformed militia men who have worked with government soldiers and aerial bombardments to purge villages of their darker-skinned black African inhabitants. The government denies any relationship to the Janjaweed, but ousted villagers say the links are strong, and their accounts are backed by numerous aid workers and outside experts. Human rights groups and international officials charge that the Janjaweed have been used as a tool of the government to pursue a radical policy resembling ethnic cleansing.

The conflict has pitted Arab nomads and herders against settled black African farmers. The tensions have been worsened by droughts in the north and the slow creep of the desert southward. For 20 years rebels in southern Sudan have sought to topple the Arab-dominated government in the north. Two million people died in that larger conflict, and a peace agreement is considered near. But since early 2003 two rebel groups in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, initiated a separate rebellion, complaining that the region's people, especially the black Africans, were being marginalized.

Sudan's decades-old civil war was much about religion — the north is mostly Muslim, the south animist and Christian. Darfur's conflict is over ethnicity and resources; it pits Muslim against Muslim. The rebels here scored some early victories, and the government responded with a fury, angering countries that thought it was finally taking the country toward peace after decades of civil war. The army has used helicopter gunships and old Russian-made Antonov planes loaded with bombs. But the Arab-African rivalry has long festered here, and the most ruthless weapon has been the mounted Janjaweed fighters, who know no rules of war.

The Janjaweed ride camels and horses and use automatic weapons against those they come across. They ride into villages en masse and shoot anyone in sight. As the militiamen torch and loot, the villagers grab what they can and run. An empty village is an eerie place. There are no babies crying, no goats bleating, no women pounding grain into mush. The only sound comes from the wind as it whips over the huts that used to house families but now lie toppled and torched.

Today there are many such villages in the vast Darfur region. Eleven ghost villages line the main road just northwest of here. Each stands frozen, just as it was when it was overrun. Some were cleared months ago. Others were attacked as recently as last week. In each it is clear that life came to a sudden halt. Beds are overturned, and pots lie on their sides. In front of one hut is a child's sandal, but no child anywhere.

Fatima Ishag Sulieman, 25, did not have time to get away. She was in bed when the Janjaweed moved in. Two men entered her hut. They hit her, then they raped her in front of her family. "I screamed, and they ran away," she said in Arabic. Ms. Sulieman and others uprooted from their homes end up in camps, some of them organized settlements and others squalid outposts. She now lives under a tree at a secondary school in Kas, in southern Darfur. All around the schoolyard are other villagers, most of them women and children. Many of them, she says, experienced what she did. Others suffer in different ways.

Adam Hassan, a weathered man in an equally weathered robe, described a dual attack. First it was Arab men on horseback, he said, who swooped down on his village, outside Kaliek. Then, he said, soldiers moved in. In Mr. Hassan's case it was his two sons, ages 7 and 10, who were killed. Mr. Hassan now stays with his wife and two surviving daughters at the Kas schoolyard. He wants desperately to return to his land and pick up again where he left off. Like so many of the uprooted villagers, Mr. Hassan is a farmer. He relies on the heavy rains that come in June to add some life to the dusty earth. His sorghum and ground nuts keep his family alive. But he and hundreds of thousands of other farmers in Darfur will miss this year's planning season. It is too unsafe for them to farm. That reality has aid agencies gearing up for what will be more and more hunger in the days ahead. "I may have to stay here forever," he said at his campsite, looking glum. "There are too many Janjaweed."

The United Nations, which conducted its own tour of Darfur last week, said the crisis in western Sudan would last another 18 months — if the government managed to disarm the men on horseback soon. But it remains to be seen whether the lawlessness will be tamed. On one recent day, men on camelback still lurked on the outskirts of an empty village outside Kas. They took off when visitors arrived. Farther down a dirt track, a man on the back of a donkey approached another destroyed village, an assault weapon balanced on his lap. His name was Ismael Abbakar, and he said he knew how the village had been emptied — he took part, in fact — although he claimed to be protecting the villagers, not driving them away. Last year, when the chaos in Darfur began spinning out of control, he was raising cattle for a living. Now, though, he is a government soldier who patrols alone with his government-issued weapon. He pulled out an identification card to prove his affiliation.

In Darfur the distinction between soldier and outlaw has grown murky. Ahmed Angabo Ahmed, the commissioner of the Kas region, acknowledged enlisting some armed robbers in the police and army to hunt down the rebels. He said his new recruits were on the side of the law now and were not Janjaweed. "The Janjaweed are outlaws," he said.