Sudan survivor: 'All are dead'

2004-08-06 09:51

Kour - Sitting in the shade of a hut in the almost-deserted village of Kour in Sudan's western Darfur desert, Mostora Bachar has been waiting for her daughter Zahara, kidnapped by Janjaweed militias, since March.

Mostara, 50, was alone with her six-year-old daughter Awa and a son of three, Assadik, until joined in the largely abandoned village by the elderly Mariam Souleimane Teguen.

"The Janjaweed surrounded the village in the evening, gathered the people and separated the men from the women," said Mostara.

The Janjaweeds are the Arab nomads of the region, who arrive suddenly on the backs of horses or camels with their swords and rifles; they murder, maim, rape and pillage, according to aid and rights workers here; and then they melt back into their natural habitat, the desert stretching hundreds of miles across the frontier with Chad.

"I don't care if I die"

They are accused by international human rights monitors of systematic atrocities against Darfur's people of black African origin.

They killed several of the men in Kour, including Mostara's husband and her sons, aged 17 and 13, she said.

The Janjaweed then raped a number of women and went off with some 10 of them, the 25-year-old Zahara among them, and the village's livestock - the camels, cattle, sheep and goats - and food supplies.

Mostara and the other survivors fled towards the border with Chad, about 60km to the west, but she said that she had returned to the village with the children to wait for Zahara.

All the livestock quarters and the granaries in the village were empty. The wooden doors to the huts lay smashed on the ground and few traces of residents remained after the attack.

Mostara still had a few enamelled pots, a mat to sleep on and a few grains of millet left on the grindstone.

In the region, many of the villages are empty. Their inhabitants fled after similar attacks, according to rebels in the region who took up arms against the Arab government in Khartoum in February last year. Most of them went to Chad, where about 180 000 refugees live in camps.

The women were surviving on vegetables they gathered close to a nearby stream, with occasional help from Ardja Ibrahim, a 40-year-old man who managed to flee with his family and camel just before the attack, but only makes rare appearances back in the village.

Mostara said she was not scared.

"I couldn't care if I die," she said. "Everybody's dead. Who would I be able to live with?"

- AFP