Shadow Wars: Chasing Conflict in an Era of Peace

Introduction

xiii Introduction It started with singing. I was in my room at a guesthouse in sweltering Abéché in eastern Chad on a Friday evening when I heard the women’s voices harmonizing. My photographer Anne bustled over. “Do you hear it?” she asked. “I think it’s a wedding.” It was June 20, 2008. As a freelance reporter for Wired, C-SPAN, and other media, I was on the Chad-Sudan border to cover Central Africa’s escalating refugee crisis, one of the heartwrenching side effects of the region’s many civil conflicts and, more recently, the Darfur genocide in western Sudan. We hopped the guesthouse fence, audio recorders in hand, hoping to capture the sound for our radio reports. But the singing had ended. Anne pointed out that at traditional weddings in some parts of Africa the women greet the bride and groom with a brief song. We’d apparently arrived a moment too late. IntroductIon xiv When I heard the first pop-pop-pop sound, I figured it was from fireworks at the wedding. But Anne said it was gunfire. Sure enough, the next sound, closer this time, was the deep boodabooda of a machine gun. Something was happening—and it was coming our way. Soon we could see tracers stitching the darkness. Singing or no singing, this was not a wedding. It was a battle. Who was fighting whom and why, we didn’t know. Chad has long been vexed by rebel groups backed by its longtime neighbor and rival Sudan, which itself has come under attack by rebels backed by Chad. Between the warring parties in 2008 lay a UN peacekeeping force in Sudan and an EU peacekeeping force in Chad. And not far away, Sudanese troops did battle with U.S.-backed forces from the breakaway South Sudan. And with American help the South Sudanese fought the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, a front organization for Sudanese attacks on the south. Local militias and armed criminal gangs complicated the already complex eight-way fight. As gunfire enveloped us in Abéché, it was impossible to know for sure exactly why. There were too many possible actors with too many possible proxies. Responsibility for the violence was obscured, diffused, and layered. Some frightened teenage conscript might be the one pulling the trigger, but he was compelled to do so by strong, mysterious forces far beyond his control. The battle playing out before me that night in Abéché was cloaked in literal and figurative shadows. Only later did I understand that was by design. Soon the shooting was just outside our compound. Red tracers arced overhead. Rockets whooshed. I grabbed my cameras and joined Anne in her room. I realized I had forgotten the battery for my video camera. As I raced across the courtyard back to my room, two dark shapes appeared at my side: young men, dressed in camouflage, toting AK-47s. “Ça va?” I asked in my rudimentary French. What’s up? NowIcouldseethewhitesoftheireyes.Theywerescared.One IntroductIon xv of them was pleading for something, but I couldn’t understand his rushed French. He plucked at my clothes. He wanted them. As a rule I don’t argue with men carrying guns, but I wasn’t about to strip naked. I led the young men into my room and from my duffel bag dug out a spare shirt and pair of jeans. I flipped on my camera as the one soldier, breathing hard, tugged off his uniform and pulled on my clothes. They didn’t fit—he was as thin as a rail—but still he was almost pathetically grateful. It occurred to me that the guy and his friend were army deserters, fleeing the fighting. Unwitting and often fickle combatants—another hallmark of Central African fighting that, much later, I would come to understand as part of a much wider trend. I grabbed my battery and hurried back to Anne. I figured the deserters would disappear, find someplace to hide, but one of them pushed inside Anne’s room behind me. He was carrying two AK-47s and begged us to hide them in Anne’s bathroom. We said, “Non.” He cradled the weapons and shuffled out. The sounds of shooting moved down the street. “Come on,” I told Anne. I climbed atop a shed and glimpsed soldiers moving in the light of a few streetlamps. But the view was terrible...