The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (15 page)

Paul said he did not want to do that. He said he understood about my names and the other things.

“We should stick together,” he said. He didn’t like the situation, but he was firm about that.

I was then taken away to an interrogation room.

On the way inside, I decided that I had already talked enough. These were Sudanese Army commanders now, the kind of men who had destroyed my village and killed Ahmed, and I was finished with them. When they started asking me questions, I told them that I was prepared for them to shoot me, and I knew they would do that anyway, just as they had killed my brother and many of my cousins, but I did not want to answer their questions. I told them that I accepted my bad situation and they might as well ask their questions of my brother, as I was with him now.
I am dead; you know that is my situation and I know that is my situation, so why should I talk to you?

Then, for Paul’s and Ali’s sakes, I said I would reconsider this under one condition: If they would bring some African Union troops, the A.U., in as witnesses, I would answer any questions truthfully. With the mandate of the United Nations, the African Union troops were in Darfur—
some barely a mile away—to monitor the peace agreement between the Sudan government and one of the rebel groups. If the government and this rebel group want to attack villages together, or the government and the Janjaweed want to attack a village, or just the Janjaweed or just the government, then that is not the A.U.’s business, though they might make a report about it. They have not been given the resources to do much more than give President Bashir the ability to say that peacekeeping troops are already in Darfur, so other nations can please stay away. Also, African troops have seen so much blood and so many killed that their sense of outrage has perhaps been damaged for this kind of situation. U.N. troops from safer parts of the world, where people still feel outrage, might be better.

Just the same, I thought the A.U. troops could help get out the word that Paul, a noted journalist, and Ali, the son of an important man in Chad, had been taken prisoner. This strategy was something I had discussed with Paul as we were waiting in the sun of the parade ground.

“Let me see an A.U. commander and I will answer all your questions with the whole truth.”

They looked at one another seriously—two Sudanese Army commanders and two of the rebel commanders who had brought us in—and then burst out laughing.

“Daoud Ibarahaem Hari—or whatever your spy name is—you are now in the hands of the government of Sudan, and you will talk and tell us everything, even if you don’t think so now,” the older leader said through the remains of his smile. Spread out on his desk were papers describing all my trips into Darfur, and Internet printouts of all the stories
that had come from all the reporters and from the genocide investigation.

“You see? We know everything about you already. We just want to hear you say it.”

Paul was brought into the room. He asked me what was going on. I said I had decided not to tell them anything without the A.U. present, even though I had nothing to say that they did not already know.

“They will kill me anyway, so why should I talk?” This was what he and I had agreed to do when we were whispering in the sun. He told them that he also would not talk unless the A.U. were present. They took him away and asked me questions again, which again I refused to answer.

Then they brought in Ali.

“Ali,” I said, “Paul and I have decided not to talk to these people unless the A.U. are brought in here. You should do what you think best for yourself, and I will translate for you.” Ali did not speak Sudanese Arabic.

“No, I think I have nothing to say to them, either,” he said. His attitude toward these people was hardening, and the idea that he would never go home to his wife and children had taken hold in his thinking.

“What did he say?” a commander demanded of me.

“I am not translating for you. Sorry,” I replied.

We would all three go out bravely for as long as we could bear the pain of it.

I later learned from two young soldiers guarding us that we were going to be taken to a place where we might change our minds about talking.

“Do you think that will work?” I asked the livelier of the guards. He laughed a little as he looked at me—we prisoners were kneeling in the sand.

“I think you are a hard case,” he said. “But they have some very cruel commanders.”

A helicopter soon landed in the dusty middle of the camp. Five fat Sudanese generals got out and marched across the sand to meet with the local officers.

“These are the cruel commanders? It looks like they eat all their prisoners,” I said quietly to our guards. This made them swallow hard as they saluted the big men.

After half an hour, two of these generals came out to where we were still kneeling in the sun. The largest of them, an Arab man with many stars on his uniform, approached me with great anger in his face. I looked up at him. His round head was like a dark moon rising over his much-decorated stomach.

“You are the problem, here. You, not us, are the war criminal. You bring reporters in to lie about us and bring Sudan down. You are the criminal.” The anger that poured out of him was so great that you could see his soul knew very well that he was completely wrong. That is always when anger is the greatest and most dangerous.

He looked at my swollen, discolored hands, laughed a little, and told the guards to tighten my ropes. They saluted and went to work on my bindings, but it was clear to my tingling fingers that they did the opposite.

Paul, Ali, and I were taken to the generals’ helicopter and boosted inside.

The two young mechanics who had come to rescue our vehicle were also in this helicopter. The one with the broken arm was in pain as they lifted him aboard.

I shifted around on the hot metal floor where I was told to sit.

We were in the air forty minutes when bullets pierced the cabin with loud pops.

The bullets bounced around inside the helicopter, finding the back of a young officer. Praise God, it only gave him a good thumping and a big bruise—he laughed when he realized his luck. Perhaps other bullets hit the engine, for the helicopter swerved sickeningly in the sky and the pilot worked the engine at full throttle. The generals, somewhat panicked, shouted at the pilot, asking if he could keep it from crashing. The pilot said he could.
Thank God, thank God
, the frightened generals said to each other. A commander pulled me up from the floor and pushed my face into a bubble window so I could see straight down.

“Where are we?” he shouted over the engine. “Tell me where this shooting is coming from.”

I of course knew very well where we were—close to Kutum—but I told him I had no idea. I told him that down on the floor I could see nothing and had lost track of where we were. He kept shouting at me, asking if I wanted to be
thrown out; Paul was trying to get them to untie me because he could see I was in too much pain on the floor to help them, even if I wanted to do that.

When everything but the engine settled down, Ali, smiling for the first time that I had ever seen, leaned over to me from his better seat and said it would be good if the helicopter crashed, because we might survive. He asked if I knew how to use a gun. “Of course,” I said. Every boy growing up in Darfur goes hunting with his brothers and father. “Me, too,” he said. He had served in the Chad Army so he certainly knew how to use a gun. While this talk was a little crazy, I thought,
Well, it is good that Ali is thinking positively
. He was finally cheered by some idea—our helicopter crashing. I joined him in this hope. But within half an hour we were safely over El Fasher, our destination. Here was the town of my high school days. Here was the town of the government’s most notorious prison in North Darfur.

As we circled to land, one of the commanders asked if we had been fed at all lately. The young mechanics and I laughed, knowing what he was thinking: that their lapse of hospitality might be the reason for their bad luck in the air. I said we had not been given much of anything. He said we would be properly fed on the ground. The rules of hospitality are very strong here, and sometimes they come to mind at strange times.

I had seen these government buildings often from the road. They looked frightening and imposing to me in my youth, and they looked like death to me now as we came down among them. On the ground, with our hands still
tied, we were made to stand outside facing an old adobe wall, painted yellow a long time ago by the British.

A commander shouted at us, inches from our faces. Mostly he shouted at Paul. They made him sit in an old chair while they shouted at him.

“We are going to kill you right now,” one of them said. “We will show you who you are dealing with now.” They opened their cell phones and waved the screen image of their hero, Osama bin Laden, and the burning of the World Trade Center towers in Paul’s face.

It is interesting to me that people bother to shout at you, or even to hurt you, when they are planning to kill you. What lesson will that teach you if you are going to be dead? It has always seemed like a waste of energy. If you are going to kill someone, why not let him go with as much peace as you can manage to give him? I have never understood this, unless it speaks to the mental illness or at least the crazy sadness of these men. So kill us, yes, please do. But don’t hurt our ears with your screaming or show us pictures on your cell phones. Just do what you have to do and leave us or our bodies in peace.

But these tortured spirits were stirred up. When these first madmen went inside, others came out and beat us, hitting us on our backs and sides, kicking us, hitting us with their gun butts, warning us not to fall down or else we would be killed. Vehicles were coming and going, but if you glanced at them they would kick you or beat you harder, yelling, “You should not look at these things, you spies.”

After a time, the beatings did not hurt as much. I was
only wondering when exactly they were going to shoot us or beat us all the way to death. In the next minute, perhaps? The minute after that?

After three or four hours, I was the first to fall. They dragged me into a large cell where I waited for what would come next. Looking through the old iron bars of the door I watched my friends just outside in the sandy yard: Ali fell next, followed by the boy with the broken arm, then the other boy. Paul was suddenly not there in the chair. When all of us except Paul had been dragged into this room, a guard untied us and gave us a little water.

“You were lucky to fall so soon,” Ali whispered through his thirst, a little angry at me for taking this advantage.

The next morning we were taken out to the yard and beaten until we collapsed again. I would like to say that Ali fell first, but I have no memory of that. It is more painful to be beaten a second day, when they are beating on bruises. As before, they dragged us into the cell where we were allowed to rest through the night. The third day they beat us again, but then finally gave us a little food. It really needed salt and oil and was not good.
Acida
, sometimes called
foofoo
, should not be served mixed together with lentils, but especially not without oil and salt. This was meant to upset us. It would be like mixing a hamburger in a milkshake.

We all had terrible pain in our stomachs. It might have been from the beatings or from the hunger, but we couldn’t eat much. We learned from the guard that our interrogations would begin the next morning.

I was first. As they led me past the other cells, I saw Paul in one. He looked terrible. I was taken to the office of
an interrogator. My legs were tied to the legs of a chair and my hands were tied around the back of it. A large man stood by with heavy sticks and a whip.

“You wouldn’t talk in Amboro, that’s okay. Do you want to talk now?” he asked.

I had been beaten a lot in the last six days. It was wearing me down, and I knew I was in a place where they could cause incredible pain for me.

“Okay, I will talk,” I said, “if you will agree to a couple of things.”

He asked me what I had in mind.

“First, you have to tell your guards to stop beating us. Second, if you have a cigarette, you have to give it to me.”

“Okay, I’ll give you a cigarette. But if you don’t talk, the guard here will beat you.”

“No,” I corrected him, “If the guard beats me, I will not talk. It works like that. I will die.”

“Oh, you want to die? Do you know how many people in Darfur have died?”

“I know I would not be the first to die, and if you want to do that, he should beat me and I will die, but I will not talk if he beats me and I will not talk when I am dead.”

With this he laughed a little and he got the cigarette out of his pocket—a very expensive brand. He told the guard to untie my wrists so I could smoke.

As I smoked the cigarette, I told him how Paul had contacted me, what Paul and I were doing in Darfur, why I was bringing in reporters, everything true that I could think to say. He said I had come into Darfur six times with reporters. I told him something about each trip, what we
saw, the bodies, the sadness of the people, the horrible killing that the government had done to the people.

“When I was with the British TV people,” I told him, “we saw where you—I don’t know if it was you, but maybe it was you—lined up eighty-one boys and young men and hacked them to death with machetes. The smell of that—it was three days old—made the journalists so sick that they had to go back to a clinic in Chad for three days. So maybe that’s what you like to do. What the journalists like to do is take pictures of what you do so everyone can see what the Sudan Army does to the Sudan people. We saw where a grandmother had been burned with her three grandchildren. So if you are not proud of this, you should stop doing it. Journalists do what they do all over the world and nobody calls them spies.”

I may have said this a little more respectfully, but it was close to this. My memory is bad about this day because of what happened next.