Welcome
to hell
A A Gill witnesses the plight of refugees fleeing genocide in Sudan
"The Janjaweed come and kill all the men and boys. They rape the women and take some as slaves, burn the villages and the crops they can't steal."
There are rumours of war, of genocide, of ethnic cleansing; they are whispered on the gritty, boiling wind that blows across the border from Sudan. In ones and twos and tens and hundreds, refugees struggle into Chad with stories of systematic murder, rape, slavery and scorched earth.
I've been down this mine-sown track before: five years ago I covered the man-made famine that was an attrition against the Dinka in the south. That 20-year conflict has finally been settled with a peace deal brokered by the Americans and paid for by oil; now the murderous bullying has moved up into the large western province of Darfur, where the irregular bandit cavalry, the Janjaweed, are wiping out black farming communities. The Arab-Islamic government of Khartoum denies any culpability and says with a shrug that this is a little local conflict between farmers and nomadic herdsmen.
Meanwhile, the UN steeples its fingers, sucks its teeth and equivocates, hinting that perhaps maybe this might be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment. Maybe perhaps 100,000 people are dead, and perhaps maybe a million more are on the pending list, waiting to get across the border before the rains come.
Our own UN security council and the G8 have decided they don't have any immediate plans to intervene in Darfur, so the voiceless and unheeded continue to stagger through the desert into Chad, a diplomatically dumb country spectacularly unprepared for guests. The accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide hang in the air, but few with the power to do anything about them want to say the words on record. It's like casting a spell to summon the apocalypse. Once said out loud, the world is a step closer to having to confront another Rwanda, another Kosovo. But there is a selective deafness abroad brought about by conflict in the Middle East, Iraq and the constant sirens of global terrorism, and unstated but ever present is the real-world wisdom that this, after all, is just another Africa story from the continent that brought you all the defining examples of horror; where the usual calibrations of misery don't apply.
I have no doubt there are dozens of marvellous and edifying things about Chad: being here is not one of them. Chad, or Tchad as they call it locally, as if named by some passing Yorkshireman, is really no more than a cartographer's patch. The French left it here as somewhere to keep the bottom of the Sahara in, and for those platoons of foreign-legionnaires who had the most to forget. It's about the size of Germany, with a population of just 9m. I remember it from my school atlas – it had the lowest per-capita income in the world. It isn't quite the poorest country on Earth any more, but it is way, way down there: 80% of the population live below the poverty line, 80% work the sand. Its primary exports are a handkerchief of cotton, a few cattle and a near-monopoly of the world's gum arabic needs. Gum arabic is essential in the manufacture of good-quality watercolours. Not a lot of people know that; in fact not a lot of people know anything about landlocked Chad. It has no airline, no railways; it has 33,400 kilometres of road, but only 267 kilometres of them are tarmacked. Life expectancy is 48 years, and only if you don't expect much.
It does, though have a glut of human diversity: 200 ethnic groups. In the north, the Goran Zaghawa, Kanembou, Ouaddai, Baguirmi, Hadjerai, Fulbe, Kotoko, Hausa, Boulala and Maba; all Arab and Muslim. In the south are the Moundang, Moussei and Massa, who are for the most part Christian, which in Africa always comes hyphenated with animist, and they're black. They are the blackest black, blue-black, matt-black black you've ever seen.
Chad, along with Sudan, is hung across one of the least reported, potentially most volatile cultural fault lines in the world: the border between black and Arab Africa. Before the Europeans ever arrived there was a history of exploitation, slavery and massacre. Here, the appellation Muslim or Christian comes with baggage and chains. Chad isn't one of those failed states we hear so much about from smug, overachieving nations: rather it's a stalled state, one that never really made it off the starting blocks of independence. It goes through the stately motions, and boasts plenty of initials after its name from international organisations.
It has ambassadors and a billion dollars of debt, it signs international treaties (though I notice it hasn't ratified the international law of the sea yet), but it isn't defined by the niceties of statesmanship. Like Sudan, Chad is a slave to the land on which it precariously squats, earth blasted and dominated by the sun. This is the hottest place I've ever been. Temperatures are regularly in the fifties; they have climbed the thirties before sunrise. This isn't just weather, something mundane to be endured: it's a godlike thing, a shimmering, psychotic, physical presence. It's like living with a bright murderer. Achievement is not measured here, as it is in the damp, green First World, by invention and energy, but by the ability to do as little as possible, for as long as possible, in as much shade as possible.