Sudan's cruel and slow
starvation
By Hilary Andersson , BBC correspondent in Darfur
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
 |
Josna and her
baby
Photo by Sun News Publishing |
|
|
I'm sitting in the dark on the edge of a camp for displaced
people in Darfur. I can hear the loud, persistent crying of
one child rising above the murmur of the camp as the people
settle down for the night.
Tonight the stars are out - that means no rain. Last night
was not like this at all.
You can see it coming in the afternoons. The sky begins to
darken and the horizon goes an ominous, brown shade of yellow.
Then the wind starts and the dust of the Sahara desert whips
up, blasting whirling sands in all directions. The people
start to run in their long rags, heads bowed against the wind.
Lack of shelter
Then, the heavens simply open, the wind ferociously hurls
drenching curtains of water at everything around.
Mothers with their children, whose faces are twisted up in
misery, squat grasping the sides of their makeshift shelters
- which do almost nothing to keep them dry.
The torn plastic bags that make up the walls of their twig
shelters flap madly in the wind. The ground turns into a mire
of mud.
My TV crew and I run for our shelter 15m (50ft) away. All
night, the rain pounds against our ceiling. I wake up at 0300
- it is still going on.
The people on the other side of our wall are still sitting,
bracing themselves against the wind and rain, where they were
at dusk. This is what it is like most nights for them.
Waste
In the morning we wake up to hear the children crying. In
the makeshift hospital here, set up by foreign aid workers,
it is so crowded with the sick that some are sleeping on the
floors.
Among the stench and flies, the children lie wasted, staring
into space. Tiny human beings, who were born into the madness
of man's inhumanity to man, into the madness of a spate of
killing that has left many of their fathers, brothers, grandparents
and uncles dead.
And now, they face starvation which is cruel and slow. Most
of the children are too far gone to eat. Some have the peeling
skin and lesions that come with advanced starvation - their
skin is wrinkled, loose around their bones. The mothers sit
by powerless.
We spent two weeks in Darfur, driving through eerie, burnt-out
villages, empty of people.
We travelled to Mornay camp, where we were a month ago. On
arriving back, we went to the medical tent. It was strangely
quiet inside.
Four people were sitting in a circle. A mother was looking
down and sobbing silently, rubbing her hands on her face.
I realised I knew her. Then it slowly came to me what was
going on. Her daughter Nadia, whom we had spent two days with
in this tent a month ago, was dying.
The mother, Juma, was saying an awful goodbye
We moved away in their private moment. Ten minutes later Nadia
was dead.
The men took her body away to prepare for the burial. Then
they emerged at the far end of the graveyard, carrying her
tiny body in their hands. They said their prayers and laid
her body in the earth.
Juma, her mother, sat on the ground. She wasn't crying any
more.
Crying to the desert
After the funeral I went to pay my respects. Juma had two
older women next to her who, perhaps through custom, were
telling her to hold her emotions in.
But when she saw me, perhaps remembering the filming we did
with Nadia last month, she started screaming "Nadia,
Nadia, Nadia".
She fell on me, screaming, she kept screaming. She kept repeating
her daughter's name. Then the older women started screaming
too.
When Juma left the graveyard I saw her walking away on her
own, sobbing and crying her child's name out into the breeze
of the vast desert, into the nothingness of the camp.
Donkeys, half starved themselves, moved around slowly. Refugees
continued collecting water and fixing their huts. This happens
here every day.
Darfur is in a nightmare that is alive here today and perhaps
somewhere else tomorrow. Racial and tribal tensions, and regional
disquiet, have erupted into a war where the civilians are
being punished, killed and abused.
We are adults, this is the world we live in and accept. The
world we have created for ourselves.
Will these things still happen in Africa a century from now?
Will it ever change? Why are massacres of civilians allowed
to happen in Sudan? Why has no-one even counted the dead?
Money is needed desperately now to save lives. But it has
gone this far in Darfur, because no-one really noticed or
did anything to stop it. Nadia did not have to die at all.
|
