The Tragedy of Darfur

There is generally only one reason anyone goes into a refugee camp to conduct interviews. At Farchana, a United Nations facility overflowing with more than 17,000 villagers from Sudan, I imagine that reason hangs over me as clearly as if I were wearing a sign around my neck that read TELL ME ABOUT THE WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT IN YOUR LIFE.

Marion Mohammed Abdel Kharim sits next to me in an open courtyard at the camp. She has three distinct tribal scars under her left eye. When she speaks, she gestures with her hands, pulling at her stomach in grief and despair. Around us are row after row of aging brown tents ringed by crude fences made of straw and wood. The fences resemble the one that encircled Kharim's home, but the camp is not home. Behind some of the fences, just steps away from the tents, are piles of manure left by the cows, donkeys and camels that refugees managed to bring with them when they fled the civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan, one of the poorest and most desolate corners of the world. Like Kharim, they were driven here by the janjaweed, a brutal militia armed and funded by Sudan's government. Backed by helicopters and Antonov planes loaded with shrapnel-filled bombs, the janjaweed have swept through hundreds of villages in Darfur on horseback and camel, looting, burning, raping and killing at will. In the past three years, the war has claimed more than 200,000 lives and left 2.5 million homeless, creating what the United Nations has called "the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Before the janjaweed destroyed Kharim's village, she and her husband were farmers. Their five children went to school and helped their father in the fields. Located just sixty miles from Farchana, the village was home to several hundred people who lived in thatch-roofed huts of mud and rocks. In the evenings, after the work was done, people would gather to drink tea and listen to music.

When the janjaweed came, Kharim and her family set off running. "You just ran away with your clothes," she says. "You don't know how many people died." As she recalls the attack, her habit of using her hands to act out her words grows more dramatic. Describing how she watched the janjaweed toss children into a fire, she reaches out and briefly touches the arm of a little boy who is sitting next to me. She touches him, and then flings her empty hand toward the other side of the courtyard. For those few seconds, it is easy to picture just how easily that child, whose hands at that moment are buried in one of my boots, could be tossed like a doll into the air.