Darfur, The Scorched Land

Darfur began to burn in 2003. Within months, a rebellion against the Government of Sudan had turned into a campaign of violence against civilians. Entire villages were bombed, looted and burned. Men were killed, women and girls were raped, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their land. The main victims belonged to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa communities. The government of Omar al-Bashir responded to the insurgency with the Sudanese military and the support of militias that became known as the Janjaweed, which swept through large areas of Darfur leaving destroyed villages and displaced populations behind them. Survivors sought refuge in camps inside Sudan or crossed the border into Chad. In 2004, the United States declared that genocide had been committed in Darfur. Years later, the International Criminal Court would accuse al-Bashir himself of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. By then, the Darfur genocide had become one of the defining humanitarian crises of the early twenty-first century. Around 300,000 people were estimated to have died as a result of the violence, hunger and disease associated with the conflict, while approximately 2.7 million were driven from their homes.

Darfur lies in western Sudan, along the borders with Chad, Libya and the Central African Republic. It is a vast territory, roughly the size of Spain, shaped by the advance of the desert and by an economy that for generations depended largely on agriculture and livestock. Its name means “the land of the Fur”, although the region was never inhabited by a single community. Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and different Arab groups shared a territory where identity was far more complex than the Darfur war would later suggest. Almost all were Muslim, many spoke Arabic, and relations between different communities included intermarriage, trade, agreements over the use of land and also conflict. The division between “Arabs” and “Africans” that would come to dominate much of the international explanation of the genocide simplified a reality in which ethnic boundaries had never been entirely fixed.

Land lay at the heart of many of those relationships. Farming communities depended on territories governed by traditional land rights, while pastoral groups needed to move their herds along seasonal routes in search of water and grazing. For decades, local mechanisms had existed to regulate those movements and settle disputes. But the severe droughts that affected the Sahel from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, together with desertification, population growth and increasing pressure on scarce resources, gradually disturbed that balance. During periods of drought, pastoralists were forced farther south and disputes with farmers increased. The spread of modern weapons also changed the nature of those confrontations. Conflicts that might once have been resolved through local mediation became increasingly violent.

Yet to describe the Darfur conflict simply as a war caused by water, climate change or an ancient rivalry between tribes would be misleading. The conflict also had deep political roots. For decades, Darfur had suffered from neglect by the central government. Sudan was a country marked by profound territorial inequalities. Political power, investment and major infrastructure were concentrated in Khartoum and the Nile Valley, while peripheral regions remained without adequate roads, hospitals, schools or political representation. Darfur was one of those regions. The belief that the state demanded obedience while offering little in return grew over many years.

Omar al-Bashir had seized power in a military coup in 1989. Over the following decades, he built an authoritarian regime supported by the armed forces, security services and political Islam. Sudan was already immersed in a long civil war between the north and south of the country. That conflict consumed resources and political attention while other regions accumulated grievances of their own. In Darfur, the belief began to spread that the only way to force Khartoum to listen was to take up arms.

In early 2003, two rebel organisations, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, launched an insurgency against the government. They denounced the political and economic marginalisation of Darfur and accused the regime of favouring certain Arab communities. In April, rebels attacked the airport at El Fasher, destroyed military aircraft and captured soldiers. The operation had an enormous impact. A movement that the government had initially regarded as a peripheral rebellion had demonstrated that it was capable of striking an important military installation.

Khartoum's response was immediate and disproportionate. The Sudanese military began a campaign against the rebels, while the government simultaneously turned to militias composed primarily of men from Arab communities in Darfur. Those groups became internationally known as the Janjaweed militia. The term covered a more complicated reality, but it soon became associated with armed men arriving in villages on horseback, camels or vehicles after attacks by Sudanese aircraft.

The same pattern began to repeat itself across the region. Aircraft or helicopters would arrive first. They bombed settlements and forced inhabitants to flee. Ground forces and Janjaweed fighters followed. Homes were looted and burned. Livestock was stolen. Food stocks disappeared. Men were killed and women subjected to sexual violence. Wells could be destroyed or contaminated. By the time the attack was over, what remained was not simply a terrified population. In many cases, it was a place where life had been made impossible.

Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa communities were particularly targeted. The government regarded them as being connected to the rebel movements, and the distinction between combatants and civilians progressively disappeared. Belonging to a particular community could be enough to make a village a target. Thousands of settlements were attacked or destroyed during the first years of the conflict. Seen from the air, parts of Darfur began to show dark circles scattered across the landscape: the remains of burned villages.

The destruction had an immediate consequence. People fled. Entire families abandoned their homes carrying whatever they could transport. Some walked for days. Adults carried water, food and their youngest children. Elderly people had to make the same journey. Many had no clear idea where they were going. What mattered was putting distance between themselves and the areas through which armed groups were advancing.

Part of the population sought refuge near towns controlled by the government or in areas where humanitarian organisations were beginning to operate. Others continued west and crossed the border into Chad. Within months, hundreds of thousands of Darfur refugees and internally displaced people depended on international assistance to survive. Displacement ceased to be a secondary consequence of the war and became one of its central features.

Forcing a family from its village meant much more than forcing it to leave a house. Most of Darfur's rural population depended directly on the land. Their crops, animals, wells and food reserves were there. So was a social structure built over generations. Burning a village and stealing its livestock destroyed both the home and the means of survival at the same time. Even if its inhabitants survived, returning could become impossible.

This was one of the elements that distinguished the crisis from a conventional confrontation between an army and an insurgency. Violence was directed against civilians and was changing the territory itself. Villages disappeared and their inhabitants were concentrated in enormous camps for displaced people. Elsewhere, abandoned land was occupied by new populations. The war was changing who could live where.

The camps grew with extraordinary speed. Kalma, near Nyala, came to accommodate tens of thousands of people and became one of the largest displacement camps in Darfur. Zamzam grew near El Fasher. Across the border in Chad, other camps appeared to receive those who managed to escape Sudan. What began as groups of tents erected on bare ground gradually became increasingly large settlements. Humanitarian organisations arrived, along with water tanks, clinics, improvised schools and food distribution centres.

Daily life began to organise itself around the emergency. Water had to be found every day. Food had to be collected. Wood was needed for cooking and materials for reinforcing shelters. Children continued to be born. The sick needed medical attention. Women often carried much of the responsibility for feeding and holding together families that had lost almost everything. The camps offered a degree of protection, but they did not remove the danger.

For many women, collecting firewood meant leaving the relative safety of the camp and entering areas where armed men continued to operate. Sexual violence became one of the most extensively documented features of the conflict. Women and girls were raped during attacks on villages, while fleeing and around displacement camps. In numerous testimonies, survivors described assaults accompanied by insults referring to their ethnic identity. The scale and repetition of the attacks led investigators to consider sexual violence not merely a consequence of the disorder of war, but part of the campaign of terror directed against particular communities.

The consequences continued long after the assault itself. Some women became pregnant. Others suffered injuries or disease. Many also faced stigma within their own communities. In a conflict in which destroying the security and cohesion of a population was part of the violence, rape could have consequences extending far beyond the individual victim.

Men faced another danger. During some attacks, they were separated from women and children and killed. Being a young man could be enough to be regarded as a rebel. Bodies were left among burned homes and along roads. Mass graves were found in other locations. The absence of reliable records and the difficulty of reaching large areas of Darfur made it impossible to establish precisely how many people died.

The death toll quickly became one of the major difficulties in measuring the scale of the Darfur genocide. There was no comprehensive register, and estimates varied considerably. Not everyone died from gunfire or bombing. Displacement produced hunger, disease and a lack of access to medical treatment. A child who died from diarrhoea in a camp after the family had been driven from its village was also a victim of the conflict, even though no bullet had directly caused the death. Over time, an estimate of around 300,000 deaths became one of the most widely used figures for the human cost of the first years of the crisis.

By 2004, the humanitarian emergency had become impossible to conceal. More than a million people had already been forced from their homes, and international organisations warned that the combination of violence, hunger and disease could produce an even greater catastrophe. The Darfur conflict began to appear regularly in international media. Photographs showed villages reduced to ashes, columns of refugees crossing an unforgiving landscape, malnourished children and camps spreading across vast areas of land.

The conflict also acquired an international political dimension. The Sudanese government denied that it was conducting a campaign against civilians and presented the Janjaweed as groups beyond its control. Testimony collected on the ground and international investigations, however, pointed to close coordination between military operations and the militias. Air attacks followed by the arrival of Janjaweed fighters had occurred too consistently to be dismissed as unrelated events.

In September 2004, US Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United States Senate and declared that genocide had been committed in Darfur and that the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed bore responsibility. The word carried enormous historical and legal weight. Only ten years earlier, the world had witnessed the genocide in Rwanda. Governments and international organisations had subsequently repeated that such mass killing should never again be allowed to take place while the international community stood by.

Darfur tested that promise. The debate over whether the atrocities should legally be defined as genocide occupied governments, lawyers and international organisations for months. A United Nations commission documented killings, torture, disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and forced displacement. It concluded that Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed had committed widespread crimes against humanity and war crimes, although it did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that the Sudanese government as such had pursued a policy of genocide. The distinction concerned a specific legal threshold: proving genocide requires more than establishing mass killing or forced displacement. It requires evidence of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group.

The legal debate changed little for those living in the camps. For a family that had seen its village disappear, the difference between genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity could seem remote. Their experience was simpler to describe: armed men had arrived, neighbours had been killed, homes had been burned and returning was no longer safe.

In 2005, the United Nations Security Council referred the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court. The investigation eventually reached the highest level of the Sudanese regime. In March 2009, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 2010, it issued a second warrant adding charges of genocide relating to acts directed against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. It was the first time the International Criminal Court had charged a sitting head of state with genocide.

Al-Bashir remained president of Sudan. The arrest warrants carried enormous legal and symbolic significance, but they also demonstrated the limits of international justice. The ICC has no police force of its own and depends on states to execute its warrants. For years, al-Bashir was able to travel abroad without being arrested. For the displaced people of Darfur, the man international justice accused of some of the world's most serious crimes remained president of the country to which they belonged.

Meanwhile, the war continued to change. Rebel movements divided into competing factions, new groups emerged and negotiations produced agreements that failed to end the violence. In 2006, a peace agreement was signed in Abuja, Nigeria, but only part of the rebellion accepted it. Fighting continued and alliances became increasingly complex. Violence between the government and rebels was joined by fighting among rebel factions and local conflicts over land and resources.

For civilians, that complexity meant that security remained elusive. Returning to a village could mean crossing territory controlled by armed groups. In some cases, the homes no longer existed. In others, the land had been occupied. The possibility of returning depended not only on whether an attack had ended, but on whether the basic conditions needed to rebuild a life still existed.

Humanitarian assistance became a permanent presence. Thousands of international and Sudanese aid workers took part in one of the world's largest relief operations. Food was distributed, wells were drilled, clinics operated and vaccination programmes were organised. Millions of people depended to varying degrees on this infrastructure. Humanitarian organisations themselves worked under pressure, facing restrictions on movement, attacks and expulsions. Access to vulnerable populations repeatedly became part of the political struggle surrounding the war.

The international community also attempted to establish a force capable of protecting civilians. An African Union mission arrived first, followed in 2007 by UNAMID, the joint United Nations-African Union operation. It became one of the largest peacekeeping missions deployed at the time. Its mandate included protecting civilians, but Darfur was vast and international forces never had the capacity to guarantee the security of every displaced population and every community.

By then, Darfur had become a global cause. Campaigns demanding action against the genocide emerged in the United States and Europe. Universities, religious organisations, civil society groups and public figures took part in demonstrations and awareness campaigns. Images of the war circulated far beyond Sudan. Photographs made in destroyed villages and refugee camps gave a human face to a crisis that statistics alone could not explain.

Those photographs showed a particular part of the war. They did not show diplomatic negotiations or United Nations resolutions. They showed what remained afterwards: houses reduced to ash, families waiting for food distributions, children living beneath sheets of plastic, women walking long distances to collect water, men who had lost their livestock and crops. People who months earlier had lived from their own land now depended on international aid for food.

That transformation was one of the deepest consequences of the Darfur genocide. Violence turned self-sufficient communities into displaced populations. A family might have owned a home, livestock and crops and belonged to a network of relationships that allowed it to survive without outside assistance. After an attack, it could find itself with nothing within a matter of hours. A refugee or displacement camp was not simply the place to which someone had escaped. It was the physical consequence of everything that had been lost.

Children made up a large part of that population. Many reached the camps after walking for days. Some had witnessed relatives being killed. Others had become separated from their parents during the flight. Malnutrition and disease were constant threats, particularly during the first months of the crisis. Humanitarian organisations tried to maintain schools and spaces for children, but an entire generation began to grow up inside a situation that had initially been conceived as temporary.

The temporary gradually became permanent. Tents were replaced by more durable shelters. Markets grew. Marriages took place and children were born. Camps began to resemble small towns. Yet they remained places organised around an absence: the inability to return home.

For many families, their land was only a few kilometres away. They could know exactly where their village stood and still be unable to return. That proximity made displacement particularly difficult to understand. They were not necessarily thousands of kilometres from home. Some were only a few hours away. What separated them was not geography, but fear.

As the years passed, Darfur slowly began to disappear from international attention. Other wars took over the headlines. The intensity of the major campaigns of 2003 and 2004 declined and the conflict became increasingly fragmented. But fewer photographs of burning villages did not mean that the crisis was over. Millions remained displaced and the conditions preventing their return had not been resolved.

That is one of the keys to looking at photographs from the first phase of the Darfur crisis today. The images belong to a specific moment, but they show the consequences of decisions that would shape lives for years. A village burned in 2004 does not represent only the aftermath of an attack. For the people who lived there, it could mark the beginning of decades of displacement. A child photographed in a refugee camp is not simply a refugee child. It is someone whose relationship with land, education, family and future was altered by a war that child did not create.

Darfur was a war between the Government of Sudan and rebel movements, but it was also a campaign against civilian communities identified by their ethnicity. That distinction is fundamental. The Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa were not merely victims because they happened to be caught between two armies. Their villages were systematically attacked, their populations displaced and their means of survival destroyed, making return extremely difficult. That reality lies at the heart of the genocide charges that would eventually reach President Omar al-Bashir.

It is equally important to avoid another common simplification. Darfur was not simply a war of “Arabs against Black Africans”. Such a description erases the complexity of a region where communities had lived alongside one another for generations and identities often overlapped. There were Arab communities that did not participate in the atrocities and individuals who protected neighbours from other groups. Rebel forces also committed abuses. What transformed local divisions into a machinery of persecution was above all their political and military exploitation.

Al-Bashir's government found in those divisions a means of fighting an insurgency without relying exclusively on the regular army. It armed and supported local militias, turned certain communities into allies and treated others as part of the enemy. The consequence was that the war ceased to distinguish between a combatant carrying a weapon and a farmer who belonged to the same ethnic community. Once that distinction disappears, an entire civilian population can become a target.

The photographs made during those years document precisely that moment. Before Darfur became a legal argument, before international courts issued arrest warrants and before the crisis gradually disappeared from the headlines, there were people who had just lost their homes. The history was still unfolding in front of them.

Understanding those photographs does not require knowing every negotiation, every rebel faction or every United Nations resolution. It requires understanding the basic sequence of events. A marginalised region rebelled against the central government. The regime responded with the military and allied militias. Civilian populations from particular communities were identified with the insurgency. Their villages were attacked, their inhabitants killed or displaced and their means of survival destroyed. Millions were forced from their homes and hundreds of thousands died as a direct or indirect consequence of the conflict. The United States declared that genocide had taken place, and the International Criminal Court eventually charged the president who governed Sudan when the violence began with genocide.

Behind that sequence, however, lies a more immediate reality. Someone lived in a place and one day had to leave it in order to survive. A home, animals, crops, neighbours and the dead were left behind. The person walked until reaching safety and then discovered that being safe did not mean being able to return. Repeated hundreds of thousands of times, that experience explains the human reality of the Darfur genocide more clearly than any legal definition.

The war turned the distance between a village and a displacement camp into the distance between two lives. On one side was everything that existed before the attack. On the other was an existence organised around survival and waiting. Between them stood the burned villages.

That is what the photographs from the first phase of the Darfur crisis document. Not the end of a war, but the moment when millions of people understood that surviving could mean leaving behind everything that, until then, had been their life.