An Arab shepherd says that for three years he was forced to raze the villages of black Africans in Sudan's Darfur region, Martin Fletcher reports

October 19, 2006

OUTSIDE the back window, Bakerloo Line trains rattle past. Downstairs someone makes tea. But in the upstairs living room of a nondescript house off Lambeth Road in South London a slight, softly spoken young man tells a story of atrocities in a far-off land that is anything but mundane.

Dily, a Sudanese Arab, recounted how for three years he and his fellow Janjaweed charged the farming villages of Darfur on camels and horses, raking the huts with gunfire and shouting: "Kill the slaves. Kill the slaves."

He reckons that he attacked about 30 villages in all, and cannot count the people he shot. The villages were destroyed, he said, and the men, women and children killed - sometimes with the help of government airstrikes.

Survivors "would be left there ... Sometimes they made it to camps but mostly they died of thirst or starvation".

Dily is a rarity in that wretched conflict. Filled with disgust, he escaped and last month, with the help of people-smugglers, reached Britain, where he is seeking political asylum.

Dily contradicts the Sudanese Government's claims that it has no control over the Janjaweed - the predominantly Arab "devils on horseback" who have driven twomillion of Darfur's black Africans into refugee camps and killed at least 200,000.

He claimed the Government deceived innocent Arab shepherds like himself into joining the Janjaweed, saying they had to defend their communities against attack by Darfur's black African rebel groups. They were trained and armed by Sudanese soldiers, ordered by the Government to attack Darfur's villages and given military support. The Janjaweed was formed for ethnic cleansing, he insisted. "Why (else) would you attack villages, kill people, displace them and kill them in their thousands?"

Dily is not his real name. His wife and child remain in Sudan and he fears for their safety if he is identified.

Nor can Dily's story be independently verified, but he specified names, places and events, and spoke with the accent and idiom of the area he said he came from. "He's for real," said Ishag Mekki, deputy chairman of the Darfur Union, which represents Darfuris in Britain. James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust, which campaigns against genocide, agreed: "We've checked his credibility as much as we can and we're convinced he is who he says he is."

The BBC reported yesterday that it had interviewed a former member of the Janjaweed identified only as "Ali", who also admitted to killing villagers in Darfur with government support.

Dily, who is in his early 20s, rarely smiled and fidgeted as he spoke through an interpreter. He said he was tending his family's camel herd in northern Darfur when rebel groups began attacking government targets in 2003: droughts had set black African farmers against nomadic Arabs and the rebels accused the Government of siding with the Arabs.

Dily said he was pressed to join the Janjaweed by tribal elders, who were under pressure from government officials. "We were told we were Arab nomads and we had to protect our lands and our cattle," he said.

Dily went to a training camp near the town of Kebkabiya. Uniformed Sudanese soldiers spent about 20 days teaching hundreds of Janjaweed recruits how to use guns and attack villages, he said.

They were organised into battalions of more than 500 men each. They were paid two million Sudanese pounds ($1173) for the use of their camels and promised a monthly salary of 500,000 Sudanese pounds.

Then they were unleashed. Apart from occasional visits home, Dily and his battalion - led by a former bandit - spent the next three years on the move. "The Government said attack all villages. The local commanders decided which," he said.

Sometimes they used satellite telephones to request airstrikes by the Sudanese military helicopters. "We would see smoke and fire and then we would go in."

The commanders said the villages had to be destroyed. "Mostly they said, 'Kill the blacks. Kill the blacks.' The majority of (the victims) were civilians, most of them women."

Dily denied raping women but said other Janjaweed did. "They took girls and women away, just out of sight, and started to rape them. Sometimes you heard gunshots if they refused."

Dily and his colleagues did not even know what they were fighting for, but faced execution if they disobeyed orders. "I hated the war and I hated the killings and decided to leave and to leave Sudan altogether," he said.

One night he slipped away from the camp and hid in the mountains for three days, then made his way to the town of Kutum. A fellow Arab drove him to Mellit, and from there he was smuggled by car to the Libyan border for 500,000 Sudanese pounds. He reached Italy on a small boat packed with 25 other illegal immigrants, paid more money to get to Paris and was smuggled into Britain.

He arrived somewhere - he thinks Oxford, west of London - on September 20. He was arrested and sent to Croydon in south London to apply for asylum. He lives in a hostel, haunted by memories of burning villages.

The Aegis Trust plans to present Dily's testimony to the International Criminal Court.

The Times

Source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au/sto...html