Myanmar’s Descent, Seen From 150 Miles Up

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

In the “before” shot, from May 2004, the village is there, a cluster of seven roofs near a small lake. In the “after” shot, from February of this year, the houses are gone.

Satellite photographs of rural Myanmar released yesterday show what seems to be evidence of human rights abuses gathered from space: villages wiped out, populations relocated and military encampments rising.

The images, of events long reported, were released by the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in coordination with the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a group working to end such abuses and bring democracy to the country known as Myanmar.

“We want to show the military junta that we are watching from the sky,” said Aung Din, the campaign’s policy director.

Myanmar’s ruling junta is in the middle of a violent crackdown on urban protests that were provoked by price increases and are being led by monks. The release of the pictures was hastened for that reason.

Those pictures show rural provinces that are home to the Karen and Shan tribes, but the director of the project, Lars Bromley, said it had now asked the satellite companies to train their cameras on monasteries, military camps and urban plazas where demonstrations form.

Mr. Aung Din said that because the junta had apparently cut Internet and telephone ties with the outside world to prevent pictures of the violence from getting out, “we’re trying to monitor them via satellite.”

The newly released photographs were taken from seven years to a few weeks ago by three commercial satellites that pass over Myanmar about twice a week, about 150 miles up. They give fairly clear pictures of objects down to about three feet across; roofs, fences and some trees are distinguishable, as are stretches of ground that look burned.

In recent years, a United Nations report found, 3,000 villages of the Karen and nearby tribes have been destroyed, and more than 500,000 people have been driven from their homes. Government troops are accused of systematically raping girls and forcing children to join their ranks.

In several images, all or parts of villages are gone. In one, a palm grove that once looked carefully tended appears overgrown. In others, rows of new buildings have sprung up in refugee camps, or military encampments have expanded and new fences and roads can be seen.

The targets were chosen to corroborate witnesses’ reports of attacks or troop movements gathered by advocates from the Free Burma Rangers, the Karen Human Rights Group and the Thailand-Burma Border Consortium, which have representatives in the area.

One of the hardest parts, Mr. Bromley said, was deciding where to tell the satellites to aim in the region, which is smaller than 1,000 square miles, because tiny villages are often not on maps and refugees shift location. Although global positioning system devices would solve that problem by providing coordinates, for a member of one of the rights groups to be caught on the ground with one “would be a death sentence,” he said. “They would be shot on sight.”

The science society’s human rights project began 30 years ago, helping forensic teams sift mass graves in Argentina.

Recently, it has used satellite photographs to document human rights violations in Darfur and in Zimbabwe. In May 2006, it showed that a Zimbabwean settlement that was a hotbed of political opposition to President Robert Mugabe had been bulldozed flat. It had had 850 homes, and at least 6,000 residents.

Chaos in Darfur on Rise as Arabs Fight With Arabs

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NYALA, Sudan, Aug. 28 — Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.

In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other’s villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims.

United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south.

Darfur’s violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers.

United Nations officials said tribal and factional fighting was killing more people than the battles between government and rebel forces, which, except in a few areas, have declined considerably.

Though the recent round of clashes between the splintering groups has not come close to taking as many lives as the thousands who were dying each month during the height of the conflict in 2003 and 2004, many aid officials say they fear that the situation is getting out of control.

“The fragmentation of armed groups is among our major concerns,” said Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Sudan. “This is making the situation even more complex, and more difficult for civilians as well as for humanitarians trying to help them.”

The rising insecurity is spelled out in two color-coded maps taped to Mr. Giuliano’s wall in Khartoum, the capital. One is from May 2006 and has only a few pockets of orange and yellow danger zones. But on the map from this June, the danger zones are everywhere.

United Nations officials say the militias may be jockeying for power and trying to seize turf before the long-awaited hybrid force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers begins to arrive, perhaps later this year. Today’s battlefields are superimposed on yesterday’s, with the Arab militias killing one another over the same burned villages and stingy riverbeds where so much blood has already been spilled.

Though many Western diplomats and a seemingly endless supply of advocates have blamed the Sudanese government for arming Arab militias in the first place, an accusation the government denies, several independent observers in Sudan said the government was not driving this phase of the conflict.

“The government is no longer arming the janjaweed,” said Col. James Oladipo, the African Union commander in Nyala, in South Darfur. The problem now, he said, is “bandits and factions.”

Some aid workers say Darfur is beginning to resemble Somalia, the world’s longest-running showcase for AK-47-fed chaos. Highwaymen in green camouflage — rebel fighters? local militia? janjaweed? — routinely flag down trucks and drag out passengers, robbing the men and sexually assaulting the women. Newly empowered warlords are exacting taxes. The galaxy of rebel armies — the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, the Popular Forces Troops, the Sudan Democratic Group, to name a few new arrivals — keeps expanding, and ideology seems to fade away. Despite peace talks among them in early August, the rebels, mostly non-Arabs, are now also battling themselves.

Among Arabs, one of the most egregious examples of the recent infighting happened on the morning of July 31 near Sania Daleibah, in southern Darfur. Terjem leaders said hundreds of Terjem had gathered to bury an important sheik. Then they were suddenly surrounded. It was Mahria tribesmen, and according to United Nations reports and witness accounts, the Mahria opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and belt-fed machine guns and mowed down more than 60 Terjem.

“It was a massacre,” said Mohammed Yacob Ibrahim Abdelrahman, the top Terjem leader. “By our brothers.”

The Arab-Arab violence is impeding the slow recovery process that had begun in some parts of Darfur. Around 2.2 million people are stuck in displaced persons camps, though some had been taking the first steps to leave, like villagers from Jimaiza, north of Nyala, who left their camp in July to go back to plant their peanut fields. They were not worried about Arab militias raiding their village, they said. Those days seemed over. But then the Terjem-Mahria feud erupted.

“It was strange,” said Abakar Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a leader of the Fur tribe, which is non-Arab and the biggest in Darfur. “A few days after the fighting, a Mahria elder came up to me and said: ‘Tell your people not to go back to the camp. They’re safe in the village. We don’t have a problem with you.’ ”

But Mr. Abakar shook his head and laughed.

“I know these people,” he said. “They killed my wife and burned my hut. I’ll never trust them.”

Not all Arab tribes joined the bloodletting when Darfur exploded in 2003. But according to United Nations documents, the Mahria and the Terjem did.

The Mahria are nomadic camel herders from northern Darfur, rugged people of the desert whose militias have helped the Sudanese government patrol the long, sandy border with Chad. The Terjem are farmers and cattle herders who lived closely with the Fur. The Mahria knew how to fight. The Terjem knew where the Fur lived.

Together, the two tribes massacred many Fur villagers, according to United Nations officials and Fur survivors. Then they divvied up Fur land. But the partnership broke down late last year, when, Terjem leaders say, the Mahria kidnapped a 14-year-old Terjem boy. For their part, Mahria leaders say the Terjem started it by stealing Mahria animals, an act that had to be answered.

Juma Dagalow, a Mahria sheik, said that after one ambush in which Terjem gunmen killed many Mahria, he called other sheiks by satellite phone and rallied the troops.

“We went to that funeral to attack them, to finish the account,” the sheik explained, adding that his people were “a little aggressive.”

It was then that the wali stepped in. The wali, or governor, of South Darfur called a peace conference and urged neutral tribes to mediate a cease-fire.

The wali, Ali Mahamoud Mohammed, said in an interview that such clashes were “just a natural part of the life of the tribes” and something he had witnessed growing up in Darfur in the 1970s.

Mr. Ali said the fighting began in December, when the Mahria headed south on a seasonal migration with their camels and trampled through Terjem territory near the Bulbul River. The fighting predictably resumed in July, he said, when the Mahria trampled back.

The governor said he sent troops to Bulbul to quell the fighting. But the Arab-Arab bloodshed, fueled by an overflow of guns in Darfur and a breakdown in the traditional order, seems to be spreading faster than anyone can control. Several tribes have recently fought over land, livestock and the right to extort money along certain trade routes. Among those fighting: Hotiya versus Rizeigat (the Rizeigat are a huge tribe that includes the Mahria); Rizeigat versus Habanniya; Habanniya versus Salamat.

Tribal feuds that used to be reconciled by sheiks before the body count reached into the hundreds are now turning into tribal wars.

And there may be a connection to the rampant banditry, which seems to spare no one — not aid workers, villagers or even Sudanese government officials.

“As these groups split,” said Colonel Oladipo of the African Union, “banditry becomes the source for weapons, money and food in order to sustain their factions.”

The 50 miles of asphalt running between Nyala and the neighboring town of Kas, which cuts straight through a Terjem stronghold, have become bandit boulevard. On a single day in late August, there were six attacks. Traveling by road has become so dangerous in Darfur that the United Nations now uses helicopters to fly even 12 miles.

“There’s absolutely no law and order in this place,” said Annette Rehrl, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The insecurity has driven away some aid workers, United Nations officials said, with 12,300 working in Darfur, 16 percent less than last year.

It has also cemented tens of thousands of Terjem, who traditionally roam with their animals for part of the year, in internally displaced persons camps where they are not free to move. Out here, newly widowed women lie in plastic huts, flies exploring the corners of their eyes. Once proud sheiks have been reduced to carrying sacks of sand on their backs for work. A Terjem baby with a three-inch, bubbly scar at the base of her spine — a recent gunshot wound — howled her head off.

“We just sit here, hating ourselves,” said Mariam Mohammed, a wisp-thin Terjem woman who said her husband had been shot dead in front of her. “Just look at me. I’m half of what I used to be.”

Sudan says Darfur rebels killed 41 in Kordofan attack

Sat Sep 1, 2007 8:34AM EDT
By Simon Apiku

KHARTOUM, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Sudanese rebels from war-torn Darfur killed 41 people in an attack earlier this week on a base for government forces in the neighbouring Kordofan region, Sudan's interior ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

"Information shows there were 41 martyrs, including people from the area," the ministry said, without saying how many of the dead were members of its forces.

On Wednesday, Darfur rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army's Unity faction (SLA Unity) said they had seized an army base in Wad Banda in North Kordofan State.

The interior ministry said the attack was on a base for central reserve forces, a branch of the police.

The fighting came just days before U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was due to arrive in Sudan to try to set a timetable to revive Darfur peace talks between the government and rebels after a May 2006 deal faltered.

The rebels said the base they attacked was the logistical and supply centre for ongoing attacks in South Darfur, where rebels say an aerial bombing campaign has driven thousands of people from their homes over the past month.

Ban, due to arrive on Monday, has deplored the recent surge of violence as "simply unacceptable" and has condemned the government bombardment as a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

The Sudanese interior ministry statement said that following the Kordofan attack, a combined force of police and armed forces pursued the rebels and captured a number of them in an ambush. It did not say how many rebels it captured.

"They will face justice and these measures will apply to all those who supported this criminal act," the ministry said.

It added that it would also prosecute anybody suspected of inciting or abetting the attack and anybody else who gave sanctuary to the rebels.

JEM commander Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr denied any of the group's men were arrested: "That's not true ... The battle is over and we defeated the armed forces."

The U.N. and AU hope to launch peace talks in October and both voiced concern about the impact of the attack on Wad Banda on the peace process.

"The attack could undermine the efforts of the U.N. and AU special envoys at a time of serious and sensitive consultations to launch the renewed peace talks on Darfur," the U.N. Mission in Sudan said in statement on Thursday.

The AU said the attack happened when the U.N., AU and "the entire international community have converged all efforts toward upcoming peace negotiations."

International experts estimate 200,000 people have died since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing the central government of neglecting the region. The Sudanese government denies the charge and says 9,000 have died in Darfur.

Sudan's Bashir Begins Tour of Darfur

Associated Press
Sunday, July 22, 2007; A14

KHARTOUM, Sudan, July 21 -- Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, implicated by many governments and human rights organizations in Darfur's violence, visited the troubled region Saturday for the first time since the start of the four-year conflict there.

Bashir is scheduled to visit Darfur's three provincial capitals in as many days.

As many as 450,000 people in Darfur have died from violence and disease and 2.5 million have been displaced in the conflict, which began in 2003 when rebels from ethnic African tribes rose up against Bashir's Arab-dominated government.

The government is accused of responding with indiscriminate killings and by unleashing the Janjaweed militias -- blamed for the worst atrocities in Darfur. The United States has condemned the killings as genocide, a charge the government denies.

Under heavy pressure from the United Nations, Bashir recently agreed to allow the deployment of 3,000 U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur to support 7,000 poorly equipped and underfunded African Union troops already there. He has agreed in principle to an even larger force, but the deal has not been finalized.

After arriving in South Darfur's provincial capital of Nyala, 600 miles southwest of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, Bashir urged all citizens to unify against tribalism and sedition.

"We want you to unite your ranks and do not allow any intruders or agents to split you again," he said on state-run radio.

Accompanied by his ministers, Bashir is also scheduled to visit El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, where a cabinet meeting will be held Sunday. On Monday, he is to fly to El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, before returning to Khartoum the same day.

In Nyala, Bashir criticized those trying to divide the citizens of Darfur as Arabs and Africans.

"This is but a plot that seeks to divide people as Arabs and blacks," he said. "Those who make such distinction seek sedition and plotting. Do not listen to them."

Bashir also urged "those still in the bushes," an apparent reference to rebel fighters, to return home and join the peace process. He promised they would be compensated for losses incurred during the conflict.

Just two weeks ago, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Andrew S. Natsios, accused Bashir's government of resuming bombing of civilians in Darfur and warned of a "disturbing" trend of Arab groups resettling in the area. His comments in Khartoum followed what he said was a resumption of attacks in Darfur after a lull of several months.

A Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse?

By LYDIA POLGREEN

DAKAR, Senegal

THE announcement by researchers at Boston University last week that a vast underground lake the size of Lake Erie had been discovered beneath the barren soil of northern Darfur, a blood-soaked but otherwise parched land racked by war for the past four years, was greeted by rapturous hopes. Could this, at last, bring deliverance from a cataclysmic conflict that has killed at least 200,000 people and pushed more than 2.5 million from their homes?

That hope is built upon an argument, advanced by a United Nations report released last month and an opinion article in The Washington Post by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, that environmental degradation and the symptoms of a warming planet are at the root of the Darfur crisis.

“There is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification and conflict in Darfur,” said the United Nations Environmental Program report, which noted that rainfall in northern Darfur has decreased by a third over the last 80 years. “Exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered and sustained by political, tribal or ethnic differences,” the report said, adding that Darfur “can be considered a tragic example of the social breakdown that can result from ecological collapse.”

The idea that more water — unearthed through a thousand wells sunk into the underground lake — could neatly defuse the crisis is seductive. Messy African conflicts, from Congo to Liberia, from northern Uganda to Angola, have a way of defying all efforts to solve them. Instead, they seem to become hopelessly more complex as they drag on, year after agonizing year. A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

In fact, while different regions and social groups suffer severely, Sudan as a whole has riches to spare, in oil, fertile soil, and even water. Indeed, history suggests that this newly discovered lake is just as likely to become a source of conflict as a solution to the bloodshed.

Successive Sudanese governments and their colonial precursors have adopted agricultural policies that have almost inevitably led to conflict. They have favored large mechanized farms and complex irrigation schemes, controlled by the government and its allies, over the small, rain-fed farms that are the backbone of the rural economy in much of Sudan.

In eastern Sudan, where a rebellion has been brewing for years, the Beja people have nursed grievances since Britain and Egypt ruled Sudan jointly during the first half of the 20th century. Under their rule, irrigation programs for commercial farming deprived the Beja of their prime grazing land.

Post-colonial governments, which in the early years had the blessing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, took vast tracts of land in the name of agricultural development, turning farmers who worked their own land into wage laborers for the state and its allies.

Some Sudanese have even been pushed off their land entirely. In the early 1990s the Nuba people were forced into “peace villages,” where they provided a steady supply of cheap, captive labor to mechanized farms. In other areas, including parts of Darfur, intensive mechanized farming by the government and investors who were heedless to the need to protect the fertility of the land left large tracts barren.

A vast new agricultural scheme in a largely uninhabited swath of northern Darfur is more likely to fit into this destructive pattern than not, said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities.

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

During those years, the government exploited tensions over water and land to achieve its own aims, putting down a rebellion among the non-Arab tribes, who rose up because they wanted a greater share of Sudan’s wealth and power. It armed tribal militias to fight the rebels, and these militias unleashed a tide of violence that ultimately would become, according to the Bush administration and many others, the 21st century’s first genocide.

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.