Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan - Deborah Scroggins

Скачать книгу

later they invited me to dinner. When Alastair came to pick me up at the Acropole, I was in high spirits. I had just received my permit to travel to the Ethiopian refugee camps.

      What do I remember about that night? A flat a little less empty than most - wooden furniture mostly has to be imported in Sudan, and foreigners who don’t plan to stay long seldom bother to buy more than a few chairs and a bed - the smell of curry, a couple of British aid workers sprawled out on a couch smoking a joint, the Police playing on the cassette deck, and Patta’s kind smile as she came out of the small kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel. How Alastair and the others laughed indulgently when I told them I had come to check out the US reports of starvation in Ethiopia. How Alastair later took me aside to say that the famine I was looking for wasn’t in Ethiopia but more than 2,000 miles in the other direction, in the far western province of Darfur, on the Bahr al-Arab River in the land of the Baggara Arabs - and that this was a famine the United States wasn’t talking about.

      Safaha. It was a whisper, a word on a report, a squiggly half inch of italic writing on a map over Alastair’s desk, and yet I swear I felt a chill when I first saw the name. Alastair and I had been discussing an article in the Sudan Times that said thousands of people were starving in the town of Wau. The last foreign aid worker, a Dutch doctor, had been evacuated from the town a month earlier. I was saying that I believed the stories, but unless I could see and describe the starving people myself, nothing I wrote would have any impact. Or something like that. Alastair gave me an appraising look. Now that I understand what he knew then about the slaughter going on in Wau, I can only imagine what he was thinking. But he didn’t say anything. Instead he took me into another room. You might want to read this, he said, handing me a folder. It’s an Oxfam report from southern Darfur that was handed out at an aid meeting this week.

      I read quickly. A large influx of destitute southerners has been moving into south Darfur since December. Their arrival is connected with the collapse of security in and around Wau… Confidential: Two thirds of the children in the feeding centre have MUAC ratios of 60 per cent and less….MUAC means ‘muscle - upper arm circumference’. I knew from my reading that MUAC ratios of 60 per cent was aidspeak for saying that two-thirds of the children had lost almost half their body weight.

      How do you say that again - Safaha? I asked.

      Yes, said Alastair, and he turned on the light so that I could see the map of Sudan on the wall. There it is, he said, pointing to a tiny strip of letters in the empty lower left of the map next to the crooked line of a river. Safaha. It’s on the Bahr el-Arab River, he said, the boundary between north and south. Bahr el-Arab means ‘The River of the Arabs’, but Dinka call the river the Kiir. The Dinka and the Arabs both used to water their cattle at Safaha, but for the last year or so there have been reports of fighting there. His finger moved up the map to a town called Ed Da’ein. About a year ago there was a massacre of Dinka here, he said. Thousands were killed. A bloodbath really. A couple of lecturers at the University of Khartoum wrote quite a good report about it. They said that some of the surviving Dinka were sold into slavery. You could probably get a copy from one of them.

      Alastair put the Oxfam report back in its folder and reached to turn off the light.

      Safaha lies above the northern boundary, he said. Technically, it’s outside the war zone. Oxfam and the Belgian branch of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are working there. Maybe you could get permission to visit one of them.

      We went back to the living room.

      Just remember, you didn’t get it from me, he added.

      Patta called everyone to dinner.

       Chapter Eight

      IT WAS AN UNUSUAL and expensive thing for the Atlanta newspaper to send a reporter to Africa. I had been hired only a few months earlier and I feared that if I failed to come up with a story I would spend the rest of my career checking suburban police blotters. After four days in the Ethiopian refugee camps at the border, I had seen some of the unhappiest people on earth. But not one of them appeared to be starving. I made up my mind to go back to Khartoum and pursue Alastair’s tip. A Quaker couple staying with me at the government guesthouse made me feel distinctly callous. Chris and Clare Rolfe were British and in their mid-thirties. He had light brown hair and a beard; she had a shy smile that crept up the corners of her mouth. Their pale, open faces radiated honesty and compassion. In their cheap cotton clothes, the Rolfes looked like English hippies, but they were lit inside by the same religious beliefs that had propelled the early Quaker abolitionists. They were in Showak with their two young children, three-year-old Tommy and one-year-old Louise. They both spoke softly, as if even their voices had been trained in non-violence, and they ate their vegetarian meals alone with their children in the guesthouse. They were waiting for permission from the Sudanese government to start a community self-help project in the camps.

      Before coming to Sudan, the Rolfes had spent three and a half years in Somalia working on a Quaker project making small-business loans to Somali refugees from the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. Clare told me in her gentle way that she’d wanted to have Tommy in Somalia, but the London office had talked them into going back to England for the birth. While they were gone, fighting had broken out in the Ogaden. Somalia’s president Mohammed Siad Barre had been arming the Ogaden refugees to fight his Somali enemies. His enemies retaliated by burning down the refugee camps. The Quakers had to shut down their lending programme. The small businesses the Rolfes had nurtured were abandoned. I thought that if I had been in the Rolfes’ position, I would have been embittered. But they were not discouraged. If they ever got the necessary papers from the government, they were planning to start again among the Ethiopian refugees in Sudan.

      Chris chuckled to himself as he described his patient attempts to negotiate the bureaucratic maze of the Sudanese refugee commission. The Rolfes’ serenity fascinated me. It also made me uneasy. I couldn’t help but wonder why they weren’t more frustrated at the waste of all those years, all that money in Somalia. How could Clare have wanted to have her baby in a refugee camp rather than in England? I wondered what the Somalis and Ethiopians made of them. While the Rolfes waited at the refugee commission all day, a round-faced Ethiopian nanny looked after their children. I often heard Tommy snuffling and whining in the room next to mine. His eyes bulged oddly. He seemed to be ill. One morning as I was leaving for the camps, I saw him pressed against the chicken wire surrounding a little dirt garden by the side of the house, sobbing. He looked up at me when he heard the door open. His face was angry and pink. It dripped with perspiration. He swatted helplessly at the flies swarming around his eyes. The nanny stood behind him, impassively rocking his baby sister. I felt obscurely guilty. The boy so clearly did not belong.

      Later that day I asked a Sudanese refugee administrator who had been taking me around the camps what he thought about the Rolfes bringing their children to Showak. After all, even the Sudanese bureaucrats left their families at home when they came to this ugly place.

      Who knows why you khawajas do anything? he laughed. Believe me, everyone else in Sudan would rather be in London!

      I TOOK A BUS back to Khartoum and got a copy of the human rights report Alastair had told me about from one of the authors, Dr Ushari Ahmad Mahmud. A University of Khartoum linguist, Dr Mahmud belied the stereotype that all Arab northerners were indifferent to the suffering of the southern Sudanese. When I found him at his university office, he described with quiet precision the massacre that had taken place a year earlier in the town of Ed Da’ein. He and Suleyman Ali Baldo, the coauthor of the report, estimated that 1,000 Dinka had been killed at Ed Da’ein, while another 3,000 Dinka children had been taken into slavery. Mahmud and Baldo had visited the town to collect the information for their report. After it was published, Sudan’s Arabic newspapers had called them traitors and liars. Both men were interrogated, and Mahmud was imprisoned. He had only just returned to his post at the university.

      The British had founded the University of Khartoum as Gordon College. Now many young women on campus had taken to wearing the Islamist uniform of a scarf and a long dress. I took Ushari’s

Скачать книгу