The Sudan Handbook

236 thE sudan handbook

move there. The region was much less inhabited than today, and they

had no trouble finding an area ‘where there was no-one, only forest, lions

and leopards’. The Sheikh Abdallah had to ‘open the land’, as Darfurians

say, which means cutting down trees and driving away wild animals, to

farm, to feed the livestock and the people.

More and more Arab nomads have become sedentarized. In the regions

where they have settled, the Arabs or Zaghawa newcomers have adapted

well. Farmers have enjoyed bigger harvests than they had previously in

their homelands, and herders have benefited from the tse-tse fly retreat

to the south, also triggered by climate change. However, their arrival

has brought conflict with earlier residents – for increasingly rare natural

resources, land ownership, control of trade and political power. The

Abbala generally side with the government and the Zaghawa with the

rebels, but these two groups are both detested by most of their Arab

and non-Arab neighbours. The communities of the dars where they have

settled fear that they will use their military power to seize the land. For

the Zaghawa, this idea is substantiated by the signing of the Abuja Agree-

ment in May 2006 by a single faction of the SLA, that of the Zaghawa

rebel chief Mini Arkoy Menawi, who has since become Senior Assistant

to President Bashir. With regard to the Abbala, their large presence at

the heart of the government’s auxiliary troops means that they are widely

considered no better than criminals.

Unsimplifiying Darfur

Most of the Abbala men living in Sheikh Abdallah Abubakar’s camp wear

military clothes. The Jalul admit that some of them have been recruited

as government auxiliary troops, and have even become part of official

army units such as the Haras-al-Hodud (Border guard). But they regret

that their neighbours now call them ‘janjawid’, whether they are civilians

or soldiers. In the local Arab dialect ‘janjawid’ means ‘horsemen with

G3’ – a G3 being the German assault rifle often carried by the militias.

Later the word was altered to ‘jinjawad’, or ‘devil-horsemen’. For the

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors Jalul, this is a term that applies only to livestock thieves.

(www.riftvalley.net).