The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (8 page)

On this night, someone finally got the Anashel bone to the goal and that was it for us forever.

I have not described these men carefully because, if I do, they might be killed for what I am about to say, although some are probably dead now anyway. They decided to sell their camels for guns and defend their villages. It was not for me to argue with them.

On that last morning together, we shook hands warmly and embraced one another. While the sun had yet to rise in a very red sky, they rode east toward El Fasher on their camels, and I rode west.

I sold my camel in Tine for what would be about four hundred U.S. dollars and began to move around the refugee camps to help where I could. The fact that I spoke Zaghawa, Arabic, and English made me useful to the aid people who were streaming into Chad. Aid groups are usually called NGOs, which stands for nongovernmental organizations.

I soon had a good network of contacts in these groups and, as a translator, I helped to get refugees to the small amount of help that was at first available.

As far as the Chad government was concerned, the refugees were welcome to come across the border, but they were to remain in the refugee camps, and they were not to work at jobs—even for free as I was doing—since this might take work opportunities away from Chad citizens. This was fair, but it meant I could not be of much help unless I said I was from Chad. So I did this, because it was morally necessary.

As more NGOs came in, and as the camps rapidly expanded, the officials in charge became less willing to look the other way regarding my citizenship. A few reporters began to arrive, mostly from other African nations, and I wanted to take them into Darfur and show them what was happening. I thought I would need some kind of Chad papers to cross the border with the journalists, so I took some of my remaining camel money and went to see my cousins and friends in N’Djamena, who might help me get papers. That is how I became Suleyman Abakar Moussa of Chad. The little scars on my temples were not important; Zaghawa live in Chad as well as Sudan. It was a little strange that I did not speak French, as Chad people do, but many also speak Arabic, so I could manage.

It was a risk, and, yes, I remembered the beatings in the Egyptian jails when I was captured after trying to get into Israel. But you should always do what you need to do to be helpful.

When I was ready to go back to the border area, I went first to one of the big hotels in N’Djamena where the NGOs and reporters often stay when they first come into the area. I had heard that there were journalists there who needed translators to go to the refugee camps and perhaps into Darfur. I was told by a friend who worked in a Chad government ministry to look for a “Dr. John” at the Novotel Hotel. After three days and several trips there and to the other large hotel, I saw some Massalit men I had met in Abéché and who, I knew, spoke some English. The Massalit are a tribe mostly from West Darfur, while my Zaghawa people are mostly in North Darfur, and the Fur are mostly
in South Darfur. The two men were in the Novotel’s coffee shop, talking to a white man at their table. I went up to them and, in Arabic, asked,
Who is this white man of yours? Who is this hawalya?
That is a not-unkind word for a white person. They explained that this man was looking for translators to go to the camps, and they were going with him. Also, he needed a Zaghawa translator. It seems we had been looking for each other.

“Dr. John, I presume?” is how I introduced myself to him, which I thought was pretty good.

He was not exactly a journalist. He had arrived with people from the United Nations and the U.S. State Department to interview refugees and make a legal determination if a genocide was occurring. If it was not technically a genocide and was instead a more ordinary civil war, that would call for a different international response. For killings to be considered a genocide, the victims have to be targeted because of their ethnic identity.

Dr. John, a young American who looked to be in his late twenties, with blond hair and a bushy beard, said that he was not a doctor, but that this was his nickname. He was glad to meet this Suleyman Abakar Moussa from Chad who spoke Zaghawa, Arabic, and English. After his many questions, he asked if I would be one of their translators for this investigation into possible crimes of genocide. Yes, I would do that. I had found my fate.

Our caravan of white vehicles, the genocide investigation team, was waved through an army checkpoint at the Breidjing refugee camp on Chad’s eastern border with Sudan. It was one of about ten such camps along the border at the time.

The horizon ahead was fluttering with plastic tarps and little rags tied to sticks for shade. There were shredded green tents and torn white plastic sheeting wrapped around more sticks to serve as tattered roofs and walls. Where the road lifted a bit, this thin line of twirling rags was revealed as a vast city of desperation, as if all the poverty and sadness of the world came from one endless storage yard somewhere, and here it was. This camp had tripled in new souls during the few weeks I had been away. The thinnest shelters flapped everywhere in the wind now. Some were the torn canvas remnants from Rwanda and Sierra Leone and other previous tragedies, rewoven now
into a miserable twig and rag nest for thirty thousand birds of passage.

The sight of so many people suffering pushed my own troubles from my head. Because I had been to this camp before, I had been worrying that the people who knew me here would certainly call me Daoud, when the genocide investigators had hired me as Suleyman, citizen of Chad. I was still wanted by the government of Sudan ever since they tried to extradite me from Egypt for immigration violations. If Chad arrested me for false papers or for working illegally instead of staying in a refugee camp, they might send me to Sudan, which would surely be the end of me. This had been hanging over my thoughts as we traveled.

Familiar smells and the low rumble of a great crowd greeted us as we rolled down the windows: babies crying but also children laughing and running after us, stretching out their fingers to touch ours; mothers calling for their children to be careful, the crunch of bundles of firewood being unloaded from the backs of donkeys, the braying of those donkeys, the smoke and smell of a thousand little fires, of spiced and mint teas brewing, of hot cooking oils and overheated, dirty children. A gauze of this sound, smoke, and dust extended over the tangled nest as far as one cared to look, except where the women wore their beautiful colors, which stood out through the sticks: clean and bright reds, oranges, yellows, brilliant blues and greens. The women of Africa, as the world knows, have a genius for color, and they decorated this place with themselves, as they always do. The bold colors they had put away before
the attacks were now waving from their lean bodies with defiance—the flags of resilient life.

Perhaps a thousand women and children were standing in daylong lines for their monthly rations of wheat, cooking oil, and salt from the U.N. World Food Programme. Others, with plastic jerry cans, waited in separate lines for their turns at the water pump.

Every day these same girls and women collected wood for their cooking fires by scavenging sticks from the surrounding wild areas. These areas were quickly stripped, angering the local tribes and forcing foraging trips ever deeper into dangerous territory. As a consequence, rape was now the going price of camp firewood. If the women sent their men to gather wood, or if they came along as protection, the men would be killed. So the women and girls went alone and in small groups, often to be raped by the local men. It is the same in Darfur, but there it is the Janjaweed who rape. Many pregnancies of unwanted children were the next tragedy facing these women. The girls and women who looked at us and blinked away our dust as we drove past had the look of people who had seen all this.

Except for the food and the tattered canvas, and for some drawing paper and pencils so the children could make pictures of huts and cows and helicopters shooting people and airplanes dropping bombs and men with bayonets stabbing the people identified in these drawings as the children’s uncles, brothers, sisters—except for these, the world’s charity seemed almost invisible here. Perhaps the wealthy nations had finally blown themselves away and were no
longer available to send their usual token remedies for the problems that their thirst for resources has always brought to such people as these. It should be said that much was being done that we could not see at first glance: groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Oxfam, and Italy’s Intersos were hard at work here, but the smoky misery of homeless human beings stretching to the very horizon cannot but upset your heart.

Canvas and plastic make very hot shelters in a desert, and these were what the world had sent—exactly the wrong thing and not nearly enough of it. Perhaps there was no right thing to send; the grass huts of Darfur, so cool in summer and warm in winter, were impossible here because of an insufficiency of grass and wood poles, of space to put them up, and of young men alive to build them. What, indeed, could be built quickly enough for so many? Even so, with all the bright people in the world and so much wealth, could there not be humane shelters for such times if we are a family? Let a peace prize be reserved for those who can someday do this moral favor for humanity.

I had a pretty good idea where my mother and father were hiding at this time, and also my sister Aysha and her children. My surviving brothers were here and there, according to reports from cousins. My second sister, Halima, who had lived near our home village, was with her children in an area that I cannot mention. I was in regular contact with all of them thanks to cousins on the move.

My third sister, Hawa, who lived in her husband’s village in South Darfur, had been missing along with her husband
and children since the attack on their village. I thought my new work in the camps might help me find her and her family if they were still alive. I was looking for and asking about them always. More than four thousand villages were being attacked and destroyed, so this would be difficult.

There were perhaps twenty of us in the team: half translators and half genocide investigators from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. We translators had been trained for several days to ask questions without causing further harm to people. I was moved by the sensitivity of these investigators. Some were very young, coming straight from universities, while the elders had worked in Bosnia and Rwanda and other hard places.

The manager of the camp, who worked for one of the big relief agencies, greeted our team. I stood a little back, not wanting to be recognized or introduced by my new name. Our leaders went into the administrator’s office and I felt safe momentarily. But then the woman in charge of our group got a cell phone call from one of my cousins, who had tracked me down and wanted to tell me that some of our other cousins had been attacked the previous day. She came out and said she had a call for a
Daoud
. Did anyone know a Daoud?

Some of the other translators knew my secret story and looked at me. I breathed deeply and smiled, walking forward.

“Some of my friends call me that. Sometimes my cousins call me that nickname. Daoud is the same name as
David from the Bible. They call me that because I don’t mind fighting with bigger men.” She still looked a little curious.

“We all have many nicknames,” one of my translator friends said quickly to the laughter of others. The woman raised her eyebrows, handed me the phone, and said, “Okay. I get it,” and walked back inside. She was going to be cool about these things.

We soon split into groups to begin our work. With one of the investigators, I went to find a sheikh I knew. Each camp is like many villages pushed together, complete with their sheikhs. We asked this sheikh to help us find refugees willing to talk about what had happened to them. As he took us for a walk, I told him where my sister’s village had been and asked if he knew about her family. He did not.

“There are many other camps,” he said in a gentle way. “Perhaps they are alive and you will find them.” I could not imagine how many times he must have had to say this to worried people. There are registries of names in each camp, of course, and I always would check these, but there is too much confused movement, too much fear and illiteracy, and too many displaced people—two and a half million now—for these lists to be complete. The sheikhs, however, always know better than the NGO lists.

We walked with him through this mass of people. Very
young boys followed us wearing dirty and torn shirts and shorts. They ran around us, bouncing, trying to shake the white people’s hands, practicing the few English words they had learned in their now burned schools, or in the roasting canvas classrooms of the camp, or under trees when the school tents had blown away:
Hello, Good morning Thank you, How are you? What is your name?

I looked for a boy I met when I visited the camp some weeks earlier. He was about eight years old and wore huge sunglasses that made him look like a small movie star. I didn’t see him—not surprising; he was a pebble in this wide desert, as was my sister if she was alive.

Some brave girls joined the boys in their prancing around us, but most walked shyly along the margins of our moving crowd, holding the ends of their bright shawls tightly and sometimes hiding all but their large brown eyes. Older girls and women were coming and going with water and wood, slowing a little to glance at us. A lucky few had donkeys to help them. Donkeys are the best friends of the refugees, and were the only animals many of these families now had—if they had anything. Compared to a camel, which is like a very good truck for the family, a donkey is like a little brown cart, but well loved and well used, and often hugged and kissed every day by the children.

When I was a young boy I loved our family donkey, but in a different way than I loved my fast camel, Kelgi, who was as intelligent as any person I knew. Once when Kelgi was stolen, he walked the thief around in circles through the night so we could easily catch him the next morning.
My father scolded the man and asked his family to pay a debt of some animals, which they did. Father sold these animals to buy us some new clothes and my first shoes. A camel’s hooves, by the way, have cracks and other marks as individual as fingerprints, so a camel can be tracked a very long way, and you can see which of your friends has come through this way or that. I cannot say enough about camels. Their milk is a wonderful desert drink—so plentiful and watery that it is often used to pour over your head and arms like a shower after a sandstorm. Camel meat, sadly, is quite delicious and needs no salt.