“... she was acutely aware of the great divide between the Fur [people], the most part darker Darfurian Africans and the lighter, more powerful, semi-nomadic Arabs. Their sense of superiority, and the contempt with which they treated the African villagers ... were things she had observed and experienced for herself since early childhood.”

October 18, 2008

Tears of the Desert

A Memoir of Survival in Darfur

By Halima Bashir

with Damian Lewis

HarperCollins, 367 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Caroline Moorehead

The Globe and Mail

Stories of Janjaweed attacks on villages in Darfur, of rapes and massacres and children thrown into burning houses, have become painfully familiar in recent years. But seldom have these stories been written by Darfurians, and never, until now, by a woman.

Halima Bashir brings to her memoir not just her own horrific tale, but her experience of trying to treat the victims of a war which, for all the endless international condemnation surrounding it, continues apparently unchecked. Tears of the Desert is a brave and haunting book.

Bashir is the eldest daughter of an enlightened and prosperous farmer of the Zaghawa people. She grew up peacefully in a small village in Sudan, surrounded by close relations, the family ruled over by a despotic but devoted grandmother. But she was cleverer than the other children and her father longed to see her properly educated.

Though forced to undergo female circumcision - an excruciating and barbaric practice which she describes in some detail - she was sent away to school and then, having produced remarkable results, to university in Khartoum. It was her dream to become a doctor and to bring health care to her village.

Not the least interesting part of this exceptional book is Bashir's determination to give the explosion of violence that engulfed her country a historical context.

Long before reaching university in Khartoum, she was acutely aware of the great divide between the Fur, the most part darker Darfurian Africans and the lighter, more powerful, semi-nomadic Arabs. Their sense of superiority, and the contempt with which they treated the African villagers, and their links to the government in Khartoum were things she had observed and experienced for herself since early childhood.

Even as she graduated, her results were unfairly marked down by professors unashamedly hostile to the people of Darfur. There was never a moment when she was not aware of some level of discord.

With her degree, Bashir became something very rare in Darfur: a qualified woman doctor. Sent for a while to the accident-and-emergency department of a local hospital, she learned the rudiments of war surgery, a skill for which there was a frightening and growing need.

In the villages and mountains of Darfur, the fire of a serious war had been lit. Rebels, challenging the supremacy and poaching of the Arab nomads in times of drought, were clashing with government forces. Janjaweed fighters, Arabs armed and supported by Khartoum and accompanied by helicopter gunships, were making their first raids on remote villages.

Bashir was working in a primitive health centre in a distant village when the Janjaweed carried out a lightning raid on the village school. In it were 40 girls, between 8 and 13 years of age; all of them had been circumcised. They were repeatedly raped; the horror and the pain, for the entire community, was appalling.

As the only doctor, it fell to Bashir to care for them. She comforted them, stitched them up, disinfected the wounds. She was, as she observes, barely trained, but no training could ever have prepared her for having to treat the eight-year-old victims of gang rape, in a rural clinic with almost no medicines or medical equipment. She was becoming angrier, and more radical, every day.

A few weeks later, the soldiers came for her. She was known to have talked to a UN team investigating atrocities in the area, and her treatment of wounded Zaghawa rebels had not been lost on the government.

Her punishment was to be cut, raped, burned with cigarettes and raped again, many times. "Go and tell whoever you want what rape is," the soldiers told her when they set her free, knowing the pain and dishonour of surviving such violence.

And that is just what she has done, though not before her own village and family were in turn sucked into the fighting, and her own much-loved father killed. And not before negotiating and enduring the loneliness and confusion of flight in search of safety and asylum.

Bashir had to deal with the arbitrary and often callous British asylum process, which finally offered her refugee status only after twice turning down her application and threatening her with deportation. In her case, publicity may have stayed the deporters' hands. Tears of the Desert is not Bashir's first public denunciation of what is happening in Darfur: She has given evidence to various enquiries and spoken on the radio and television.

It is six years since the war in Darfur began. As many as 400,000 people may be dead; two and a half million more live in refugee camps dependent on international food aid which does not always arrive.

Earlier this year, another Zaghawa from Darfur, Daoud Hari, published The Translator, an account of his work as an interpreter for reporters visiting Darfur to collect material for their stories. Among the reporters was Nicholas Kristof, who has done the most to keep Darfur's conflict before Western eyes. Having described many of the same atrocities, though without the graphic details Bashir, as a doctor, brings to her account, he ended his book with an appeal to the world to intervene in Darfur in order to bring the killings and the mayhem to an end.

Bashir's memoir ends on the same note. Can the Chinese not be prevailed upon to put human rights and human lives above their need for oil, and thus bring pressure on the government in Khartoum? Can the UN peacekeeping force not be given the men and backing it needs to carry out its mission? It took great courage to write this honest, self-exposing book.

Whether the world - distracted by Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the nuclear threat of Iran and the economic crisis - will pay any attention is another matter.