Africa’s Ghosts
Faisal Omar
"They came at six o’clock in the morning. We were all still in bed. They came to kill and to burn the village; to kill all the people in the village. “We heard the gunshots from our beds, and then it started. It was like war. If there was someone who was black, like me, then they were going to shoot him. If there was a girl, then they were going to rape her. It didn’t matter if she was a child. “The village was totally destroyed, lots of people had died and there were bodies everywhere.
There were a lot of bodies. We had to bury the bodies. Children and the women, we buried them all.” In 2001, Faisal Omar was in the centre of what Jan Egeland, UN Humanitarian Coordinator, calls “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” in the region of Darfur, Sudan. When we spoke he was sitting in front of me on a stone stair, pushed out of the back of the exam schools, perched amidst the throng of Freshers’ fair, feeling “quite weak”, as he was fasting for Ramadan.
His position is unique amongst any of the people I have had the chance to interview. His achievement has been survival. What he has seen and felt is something that no-one else in that Freshers’ fair has come even close to experiencing. At the age of 28, he has lost his family, witnessed countless murders, suffered torture. You would think that he would bear some visible scars, to mark him out from the freshers wandering past us.
Yet there is an amazing normality about the way he talks about the things he has seen. There’s no noticeable difference between “they killed my village” and “my train is at 4.30” in his tone of voice. Omar has seen the very worst of the world and of humanity. It’s a wonder he can speak about it at all. Darfur has seen ethnic disputes for many years. But now ethnic violence has escalated to genocide. The region is 52 per cent Muslim Black African and 39 per cent Arab.
The nomadic Arabs and native farmers have fought for many years over grazing rights and land. The situation came to a head in 2003 when a rebel African group attacked the government claiming it was favouring the Arabs in land allocation. It is clear from Omar’s story that 2003 was by no means the start.
Other refugees claim that many times, following air raids by government aircraft, the Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, have raided villages on horses and camels, slaughtering men, raping women and stealing whatever they can find. They kill using guns given to them by the government. According to Omar, the trouble began in 1999. “Before then, we would meet the Arabs at the markets. It was peaceful at that time. They needed help; they didn’t have places to live. They were not criminals.
“In 1999 a group of 19 Arabs came, with horses and guns, and attacked my village, because we are black Africans. We found that the government had given them weapons so they could collect our food for themselves. “One year later 80 of them came, and they attacked again. They attacked, killing my village my friends. When they attack your village you have to move to another village to be safe. After 2001 we couldn’t keep moving from village to village.
We have to live somewhere, so we refused the council’s decision to move us. I was arrested and put in prison without any charges. The prison, it was a nightmare. I had a small cell, just three by three, and I had to stay there all day and all night. You have to clean the floors and clean the rooms. You have to wash the dishes, clean the toilet. I was a slave.” After two months in the prison Omar had had enough.
He gave in to the council and agreed to move on, although, being considered a potential troublemaker, he had his position monitored. The government needed to know of any of his movements. For Omar, it was time to escape. “I told them I was going to the North of the country but I went to the South. That saved my life.” Omar applied for asylum to Britain, and moved here as soon as possible.
He is still a nomad, unable to call Britain his home, with the home office not deeming the situation in Darfur serious enough to allow him to stay here. “They threatened to send me back to Sudan. The last thing was getting a letter from the Home Office saying, ‘You have to leave the country immediately or we will arrest you and send you back.’ That was a year ago. Nothing has happened. “I cannot go back; I am scared to go back. Nobody will hear me or ask me what my story is.
If I am sent back, they will kill me. I spoke to a man on the phone in Khartoum and he says, ‘If you come back you will not see the sun again in your life.’” The statistics are staggering. 2.4 million Sudanese have been displaced, with over 300,000 dead and 10,000 dying each month. One million children are threatened with malnutrition. Omar was in Oxford for the 6th October, a day of international solidarity for the victims of Darfur.
Organisers and Omar himself used the day to raise awareness and demand help for Darfur from the UN. “The genocide is not going to stop until we are all dead. If we do nothing, in 20 years there will be no black people left in Darfur. There will be nothing.” When I expressed my horror that the Arabs were able to do this, to wipe out a population, a village or a person, my amazement was not shared.
“If there is someone with a gun and there is someone without a gun and they have orders to shoot someone, they will do it. They kill easy! The government helps them, these people, and they tell them ‘these people have to move and these have to stay’. It is no problem for them. “They are normal people. This is their normal life. It is how they live, like their job. They get food by looting, they get land to live, and they get girls to rape.”.
26th Jan 2006