Masha'allah, they're saying; "what God wills," good-bye and good luck. And God knows, they'll need it, the travellers and the villagers too. For these are Chad's dangerous borderlands, where the contagion that's infected Darfur has now spread.
This is a "living village", but they're living with fear; the dread of what most accept as inevitable now, that as Africans they'll soon be chased from their lands by their neighbours, the Arabs.
Two guides have been laid on for the human rights workers, here to document how Darfur-style ethnic cleansing has now spilled over the frontier into Chad. Not far, through the bush, the first tell-tale signs -- a market abandoned, a village whose people have fled.
More villagers now on the run, to add to more than two-million displaced next door in Darfur.
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Olivier Bercault
Human Rights Watch
"Visually it's exactly the same picture as Darfur; war spilling over into Chad, it's clear."
Deja vu. Once again, the scattered, looted wreckage of people's lives; people who'd fled in terror as the scorched earth horsemen passed by.
Armed Arab horsemen, the African villagers say; the dread word "Janjawid" on the lips of Chadian Africans now -- the rapacious Sudanese-government backed militia widely alleged to be behind this -- in league with their Arab kinsmen in Chad. There's no proof, just a pattern of evidence and the certainty that like a virus, ethnic violence is poisoning the borderlands; the two conflicts now inseparable.
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We are in Chad, but it's the same pattern of attacks. This is an African village, the Arab villages are not touched by these attacks. It looks like exactly what we found in Darfur one more time."
Since January, at least 20,000 Chadian villagers have been chased from their homes; some have joined the 200,000 Darfurian refugees inside Chad; but many thousands so desperate to escape that they've actually fled from into Darfur itself, where this month's peace accord has yet to deliver much peace.
The Human Rights Watch investigators are led out into the bush by their guides; they don't want to hang around long as this area is insecure, but there's something they want the outsiders to see.
The cameraman who filmed this says the stench of death hung all round this place.
shadow/camel 3339 / notebooks 3100 / skull cap
A dead man's shadow in the blood-drenched straw and dried mud. His hat where he fell; the body moved and hurriedly buried by survivors who'd dared to return.
The investigation into what happened two hours east of Goz beida still isn't over; no firm conclusions about perpetrators yet, but from the outset one thing was obvious: this is a killing field.
UPSOT: "Shoes and another hat here."
Whoever was responsible, something terrible clearly happened; people here died violent deaths.
UPSOT: "This guy has run away, climbed into the tree and shot dead by Kalashnikov; they couldn't reach the body in the tree. It fell. Decomposing. This horrible picture of crimes against humanity."
The human rights researchers noted their grim evidence and left, urged on by their anxious guides.
The United Nations Secretary General recently called Darfur "an inexcusable tragedy." But as the UN continues to dither on Darfur, another front's opening up right now in Chad, deepening the crisis; the governments of Chad and Sudan and their bloodthirsty proxy militias drifting towards regional war.