Tribesman tells of risks he took as a translator in Darfur

When Daoud Hari, a Zaghawa tribesman from Darfur, saw the Eiffel Tower twinkling one night last week in Paris it reminded him of stars in the African desert. “Europe is very nice,” he said, “but I feel very sad to be away from my country.”
For the time being, Hari, 35, has no option but exile. He has taken extraordinary risks, coming within seconds of death, to help to draw the world’s attention to the killings in Darfur, western Sudan, as an interpreter for the international press.
His harrowing memoir, The Translator, which is about to be published in Britain, is the first such witness account by a Sudanese of the killing. It is certain to enrage the Khartoum government, which has been accused of mass murder in Darfur.
More than 300,000 people have been slaughtered by government-backed forces in what have come to be known as Africa’s killing fields. Despite losing everything dear to him, Hari, who has been granted political asylum in America, has kept his gentle manner and playful smile. It puts a human face on the suffering.
He bears small scars like quotation marks cut into his face by his grandmother when he was little. Another Zaghawa tradition is reverence of camels and Hari recalled racing across the desert on Kelgi, his favourite, when he was young.
“He was my best friend,” he said in an interview at his French publisher’s office on his first visit to Europe last week.
While some took up arms to fight the Sudanese government, Hari has tried to use words “to make the world better”. Hari’s father had noticed his intelligence and sent him to school in the nearest big town while his elder brother, Ahmed, looked after the camels. He enjoyed books such as Jane Eyre, Treasure Island and Oliver Twist.
His book was written with the help of two Americans, one of them an aid worker he had met in Darfur. “I didn’t have any idea how to write a book,” said Hari, “but my friends said, ‘Don’t worry, Daoud, we’ll help you’.”
The book offers a poignant glimpse of Hari’s village before the killing began, when Arabs and nonArabs coexisted peacefully in a time of colourful weddings, camel races and children’s games in the moonlight.
That world was obliterated by bullets and rocket fire when Arab nomad horsemen allied to the government – the so-called janjaweed militias – destroyed the village and scores like it, killing Ahmed and several other family members in 2003.
Hari roamed the desert with a group of friends, trying to help others escape to Chad. He saw places where the sands were littered with human bones, some “still wearing their clothes and leathery skin”. He found three small children dead under a tree.
Their mother had hanged herself from a branch with her shawl. “We took her down, gently, and buried her alongside her children,” said Hari. “The moment has haunted my memory every day since then.”
He met a man deranged by grief. A soldier had bayoneted his four-year-old daughter for sport. The devastated father told Hari: “He [the soldier] was all red with the blood of my little girl and was dancing. What was he – a human being? A demon?”
Hari began to work as a guide for journalists and his help in publicising the killing in newspapers made him one of the most wanted men in Sudan, whose leaders have largely kept the press out of Darfur.
His life was complicated considerably when rebel groups fighting the janjaweed became suspicious of him and he describes a darkly comic scene in which he carried on translating for Philip Cox, a British journalist, as a young rebel put a gun to his head, told him he was going to kill him and that Cox had better move to avoid getting splattered with blood. Cox called a rebel commander on his satellite telephone and won a reprieve.
“Escaping death is a wonderful feeling,” said the translator. “It makes you smile, again and again, foolishly, helplessly for several hours.”
He escorted journalists to scenes where dozens of people had been shot or hacked to death with machetes and knives, trying to comfort the foreigners when they were overwhelmed by the horror. He described a French journalist’s breakdown at the sight of dead children: “She could not talk, eat or drink for a long time, she just cried for those little ones.”
It was not long before he got into trouble again. Paul Salopek, an American journalist on assignment for National Geographic, insisted on taking him to a particularly dangerous area. Hari had a bad feeling but felt obliged to go. They were captured by rebels from Hari’s own tribe who accused them of being spies.
Together with their driver they were severely beaten. Hari and the driver were handed over to a “crazy commander” who hung them upside down from a tree for more beatings.
They were taken for execution to a valley “strewn with human bones and clumps of hair and the horrible stench of death”. Hari says he tried not to step on the human remains, “but it was impossible. I shivered with each step. So this is the place where I am going to die, I said to myself”.
Hari told the Zaghawa youths in the firing squad that he knew their families and convinced them not to shoot. He and the others were handed over to the Sudanese army and were jailed in El Fasher, the town in which Hari had gone to school.
He was convinced they were to be executed. But unknown to him a campaign had been launched and the Sudanese regime was being bombarded with messages on their behalf from politicians and celebrities including Jimmy Carter, the former US president, and Bono, the rock star. After 36 days in captivity the three were released.
On a book tour in Europe last week, Hari marvelled at the difference between Paris and Darfur, the land he loves best, calling it “another planet”. He said: “These houses are like a painting,” gesturing at a street outside his publisher’s window.
He would like to resume life as a simple herdsman. “I would be too tired if I had a big house, cars, lots of money. I like to watch the stars at night,” he said.
It might be some time before his dream of a return to normality comes true: thousands more people have recently been uprooted from their homes to flee across the border to refugee camps in Chad.
“Peace in Darfur seems further away today than ever,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
Hari hopes that his book will spread awareness of the violence. “We should all feel concerned by it,” he said. “World leaders will do something if men and women mobilise in all corners of the world.”