MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Omer Ismail, co-founder of the Darfur Peace and Development organization, and native Darfurian speaks with Jerry Fowler about the social and cultural factors surrounding the conflict in Darfur. Omer highlights the move from a tolerant society to one with a high level of violence centered on group identity, the effects of global warming, and the role of the Sudanese government.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Omer Ismail. He is a co-founder of Darfur Peace and Development, an advocacy organization, and currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, and he is a native of El Fasher in Darfur. Omer, welcome to the program.
OMER ISMAIL: I am very glad to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: Omer, I wanted to start first by going back to when you were young, and wondering what was it like to grow up in Darfur? For a kid, probably in the sixties and seventies, what was it like to be a Darfurian?
OMER ISMAIL: Thanks very much. I grew up in a region that is in sharp contrast with the region that we see today. It was a picture of tolerance where people from different backgrounds, different ethnic groups, and different clans lived together and from even different economic background. People who are farmers, sedentary in the small towns or in the villages, in the plains of Darfur, or in the dry riverbeds where they grew the winter vegetables like tomatoes, and melons, and stuff like that. You know, in the rainy season we all grew millet and sorghum. My Berti people of Eastern Darfur we grew sesame and ground nuts. You know in the Jebel area there were the orchards where we had a lot of trees; mango trees and guava and all the citrus that grow in this kind of volcanic kind of soil in the Nuba Mountains and the highest peak in the country. So these are the farmers and the nomads are two groups: the Baggara, these are the cowboys of Darfur if you will, the cattle herders who are in the South.
JERRY FOWLER: The Baggara means cattle right?
OMER ISMAIL: Baggara is cow. So the Baggara are the cattle herders, and these are in the Southern and Western part of Darfur. And we have the Abala, because abal is the plural of Jamal, which is just camel and the Abala are the camel herders and these are in the Somai Desert to the desert area of Northern Darfur. They go up and down with the rainy season looking for pastureland, and they cross the areas where the sedentary people are. They mix, they rub shoulders, they give way in certain places, and they mix together in the market place. When I am saying market it has nothing to do with like Wal-Mart or the Wall Street if you are more sophisticated. A market place is nothing but a dry bed of water or there are lots of big trees where people come in, and mostly in the areas of Darfur it is either Monday or Friday, is the market place where people bring in their goods and the very few services they have for sale. They mix in, they know each other. Mostly at the end of the soub (sp) day, that is the market day, there will be some sort of a party. Yes, you know a spontaneous kind of singing and dancing, and everyone pitches in, and people go to their different places. I have seen people who have come to visit my family from time to time. These are people that we had been working with one another, or have been interacting with. For example we have some of the Dinka people from Southern Sudan to work in the rainy season as wage laborers in our farms, in our fields. And there were people from West Africa as far as Northern Nigeria; we call them the Falada, which is a corrupted word for the Fillany of Northern Nigeria, some of them coming in their pilgrimage route across the Sahel all the way to Mecca. Many, many of them, they stay for years and they continue, meanwhile they get married, they have children, and almost in every single major town in Sudan, along this route there is Haif-alada or the Falada headquarters. So this is the tolerance; the level of interaction between these people, and do not get me wrong there were clashes. There were problems. For example, the camel herders would come in a place, the elders would be in the market place, and the youngest kids, sometimes as young as eight or nine, were left looking after the camels. They will sleep or they go swimming in a pond somewhere and they leave the camels, they get into part of the farms and they destroy part of the farms. Say the farmers come in and they hurt the camel, or even the children themselves, then there is a clash there. Normally the system of judia, which is the people sitting together under a tree, mostly in the market day, and more times than none there will be a third tribe that has nothing to do with these guys but they are coming in, offering their goodwill to reconcile between these two tribes. They will say, the part of the land that is destroyed if today is a harvest day it is going to be 20 sacks of grain, a sack of grain is five dollars, that is one hundred dollars and that is equal to three camels or what have you. They give the camels back to these guys, or these guys give sacks of grain, or in the market they get the cash, whatever it is, and give it away. Most of the times, because the people are so happy that this problem is contained, most of the time they take that money that is given as a compensation and they throw a big party and everyone goes home happy. So that is the type of mechanism for addressing conflicts that we had, without outside intervention. The external intervention came with this government.
JERRY FOWLER: Before you get to this government, let me just pursue that a little bit. I mean you are painting a picture of tolerance but kind of implicit in the idea of tolerance is a sense of group difference. That I am a member of one group and those people are a member of another group, and I may tolerate their presence but I am still very aware of the difference. How significant was it to you growing up that you were a Berti and other people were not?
OMER ISMAIL: It is very important because this is your identity. This is what we know; this is the keeper of your culture. So you have a distinct language. Some people and I am not sure, but the linguists say that in Sudan there are 570 different ethnic groups speaking about 350 languages. So your language is the keeper of your culture that is the stories, that is the songs, that is the lyrics. Everything is in your language so that is part of your culture the way that you perform in the weddings or in the funerals. To that end people are very proud of their tribes, they are very proud of their communities, they are very proud of their even clans and sub-clans sometimes within one tribe. But, that was never used as a tool to reject the other. The other is also respected because we understand that they also have their culture to keep. And we have a space where we all get together, give away to each other, and enjoy maybe the common things and the common features that we have in these cultures, and that is very important to us because always we found what is common between us is much more greater than the differences. So we celebrate these common things that we have and we try to accommodate each other when the differences occur. And within this interaction of course it is human nature; there will be competition over resources, there will be competition over even a beautiful girl, or a nice horse. This is normal, but then again people address that. People have the mechanism to deal with it. People do not let it get out of hand because they see that there are more important things bringing us together than dividing us.
JERRY FOWLER: Well let us take an example of a common social interaction that would happen in any society, where you basically have the issue of marriage. How common was it for people to intermarry among groups and how big of an issue was the group identity to the decision to marry someone?
OMER ISMAIL: It is very big. And in the intermarriages between the groups, you know your group, you know your people, and that has also had more significance than just the marriage itself, because part of that is keeping the wealth within that community. Because it all goes down to wealth and what you have, or in other words, in today’s world we say the economic factors play a major role, but also the culture of the people. You know if I have certain cows that are branded with that certain brand that shows the tribe or clan, I do not want to see these cows taken to someplace else and given to somebody. All of these things have very significant influence in the decision making when it comes to marriage building. Then again, in the sixties or before that, we have seen that it is almost exclusive that the tribes have intermarriages within them.
JERRY FOWLER: They marry within each other? So a Berti woman would marry a Berti man.
OMER ISMAIL: A Zarao woman would marry a Zarao man. Then the intra marriages came in, because we trust certain communities that we have tasted them we have seen them, and we have done things together. So a Zarao man would come to me and say “I want your sister.” I would say ok I do not reject them because they are Zarao and I am Berti or I am Arab or I am Fur. I will go there and definitely in the market place or later on when there are schools and we all lived in the same place, because mostly they are boarding in schools because the communities are very poor. So the government at that time, when we had better governments, I cannot say they are the perfect governments but they were better then this one. We had boarding in schools, where these are the melting pots of all the people, and we come from different places. The kid sleeping next to you in the dome, you do not know what tribe they came from, but you grow up and you become friends, and then you go to your friends and you remember “Maybe that guy is a Zarao, let me go ask him about this guy who is asking for that hand of my sister for marriage.” And then you go there and they will tell you honestly: “No, no do not give him your sister, he is a drunk, he is no good,” even though he is from their tribe! So they are honest about these things because they know it will come back to haunt them and your friendship will be affected. So these are the things that are there, but before that, the generations before my father and my grandfather, his father, or from my mother’s side. These are the people who reject people out of our tribe because you are a Zarao or Fur or we are Arab or we are Berti, we are not going to marry outside of the tribe or the clan. But, by time we people started becoming more and more relaxed on that. By the time I was growing up and going to high school in my home town El Fasher, for example, I went to weddings and where some of these people are coming from the farthest points apart inside Darfur. Maybe because the town, I do not want to say the city because it gives the listeners the impression of Chicago or New York, no, no we do not have cities like that. We have smaller towns, one hundred thousand people, two hundred thousand people max, and we have mostly villages. That is why we talk about the destruction of the fabric associating Darfur, because these villages were targeted and some of them, most of them actually were wiped off the face of the earth; that is the danger because it is destroying that fabric and it is destroying that culture, and it is destroying that society, and the warehousing of people in Internally Displaced Persons camps is going to make that even worse.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us turn to the violence and I guess to the extent that the violence that we have seen, especially very intensely over the last three to four years, but starting somewhat earlier than that is between groups and directed by one group against another. How did that come about? How did Darfur get from the tolerant society of many different groups that you are talking about to one where there is such a high level of violence centered around group identity?
OMER ISMAIL: Remember when we talked about the mechanisms of conflict resolution, and we said that they have their organic homegrown resolution ways and means. The external factors came in. That is the government of Sudan in this case that started pitting these communities against each other. That is when they are testing if the ground in Darfur is fertile for the evil mentality that they run the war with in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains. It is the same thing. I remember Commander John Garang, the late leader of Southern Sudan, and I would say that he would have been the leader of the whole country had he lived long enough. We were talking here in Washington and I said, “Dr. Garang, how come this is the time that you decided there would be peace between this government and your movement, and you rejected that from successive governments?” And he said to me, “I am not talking to you as a scholar who had a doctorate in Agriculture and Economics, I am talking to you also as a field commander who is a colonel of the army, and a professional soldier. I discovered after all of these years, that I was not fighting the Arab government that is sitting in Khartoum. I was fighting the very same southerners that I picked up arms to protect, because this government managed to set up a wedge between us and they have a militia, 32 militias in Southern Sudan strictly among tribal lines who are fighting against us. How many southerners do I have to kill before I go and kill the Sudanese army and then liberate the country? So this is another way of doing things.” That is exactly what they did in Southern Sudan, and that by the way, was the first genocide that took place in Sudan. And following the genocide in the Nuba Mountains where half a million people were killed, then there is the genocide in Darfur, and that is how they started in Darfur: pitting one community against the other. I am saying community because a community could include seven tribes all together, but they have them fight among these meager resources, and because of any meaningful investment in Darfur, and that is also by design. These communities have to fend for themselves, have to compete over these small resources. And when they found that there is already the seed that is going to make this satanic project successful, they went full gear for it and they started recruiting, financing, aiding and abiding the Janjaweed and giving them the marching orders to go there and wreck this havoc in Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: So you have identified the role of the government in exacerbating differences between groups, and it is a tactic they have used as you say in a lot of other parts of Sudan, but how significant to the conflict has been the issue of climate change and increasing desertification? Because this is one thing that we have often heard, is that the tensions between groups were already on the increase because the area is getting drier, there is less land available for farming and for herding.
OMER ISMAIL: I am not a scientist and I am certainly not an ecologist, but I would say one thing. We do not have a farmer subsidy act, we do not have GPS, we do not have satellites that follow a linear or lineal or they change, but we have a collective memory of our society that has traditionally dealt with these issues. One of the things that I see dangerous in this trend of blaming the environment or blaming the climate change or blaming this, is that they are giving excuse to the people who orchestrated this. And yes there is a role of climate change and environmental degradation that happened in Darfur, the desert that is creeping by so many kilometers every year, the global warming, the shortage of surface water because the underground water is still there and it is huge, and we can tap it and utilize it and none of this will happen if we have a serious government. But the mechanisms to deal with these things, we know in our collective memory, of the farmers of the herders that in every 15 years say, I am just giving examples here throwing in numbers, in every 15 years the desert locust is going to attack us. In every 12 years there is a cycle of drought that is going to happen. In every five years there is a cycle that will bring floods to us; we know it from reading the conditions of the desert, and the changing of the moon or the stars. People have these things. I can go on and on and give you examples and stories. I was six years old, I was talking to my grandfather and he told me, “This rainy season is going to be good.” And I said, “How do you know?” And he said, “Listen,” and I listened to a certain bird singing and he said, “When this bird sings in our land, we know that we have a better season.” And it was a better season. Twenty years later I was working as operation life line manager in Southern Sudan, I heard the same bird, and I went there and I followed it and I saw the bird building its nest in very tip of the branches over looking the streams and ponds, so if the rodents try to eat its eggs or chicks the whole thing would fall on the water. So these nests are so fragile that they would be destroyed by rain, and our rains coming to Darfur from the South Western side so the heavier the rains there this bird migrates to the north to less and less areas where there is rain to set up its nest until it reaches our land. So when it comes to our land in that particular year we know the rains are heavier in the South West and it is only a matter of time, two weeks or so, when we have heavier rains here and that is an indication of a good harvest season. So I learned that from my grandfather, I was six years old, and only after twenty years I realized he may not have been able to explain this to me at the time, but they know when this bird visits in a certain year that we have a good harvest. So, we know the environment that we live in and we have our mechanisms of coping with the tragedies and with the changes in the climate. Unfortunately with the people who are housed in Internally Displaced Peoples camps for the fourth year, the farmer will not teach their children to become farmers; the herder will not teach their children to become herders, because they do not have land to farm and they do not have animals to herd. These mechanisms of first having the skills of being something else will die, and the mechanisms of dealing with the environment according to the coping strategies that we have acquired over the years is going to die and is going to go away. So, the world has got to find a solution to the Darfur issue today, because a whole people go into oblivion and then we become like the dinosaurs, that kind of living, that sort of life is not going to be there for the coming generations.
JERRY FOWLER: Omer Ismail is the cofounder of Darfur Peace and Development and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Omer thanks for taking the time to be with us.
OMER ISMAIL: Thanks for having me Jerry.
