Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Artic, from Darfur to Napa Valley - Hardcover

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“THINGS WILL BREAK LOOSE FROM THE HANDS OF THE WISE MEN” DARFUR, SCARCITY, AND CONFLICT

In 1985, with the Darfur region of Sudan deep in drought, a doctoral candidate named Alex de Waal met with a bedridden and nearly blind Arab sheikh named Hilal Abdalla. The elderly nomad and his tribesmen had pitched their camp across an unforgiving wasteland of rock and sand. Broad black tents rose like sails against the rough horizon. Thorn trees broke ground at lonesome intervals, sparse grazing for the tribe’s camels. The student was longlimbed and gangly, bent forward with the eagerness of youth. The sheikh—tall, stately, stooped by age—asked him in. “His tent was hung with the paraphernalia of a lifetime’s nomadism—water jars, saddles, spears, swords, leather bags, and an old rifle,” De Waal recalled years later. “He invited me to sit opposite him on a fine Persian rug, summoned his retainer to serve sweet tea on a silver platter, and told me the world was coming to an end.”

They dined on goat and rice and ate with their hands. De Waal was studying indigenous reactions to the dryness that gripped the region. The elderly nomad described things he had never seen before. Sand blew over fertile lands. The rare rain washed away alluvial soil. Farmers who had once hosted his tribe and his camels were now blocking their migration; the land could no longer support herder and planter both. Many of the sheikh’s tribesmen had lost their stock and scratched at millet farming, relegated to sandy soil between plots of fertile land.

With his stick, the nomad sketched a grid in the sand, a chessboard de Waal understood to be the “moral geography” of the region. The farmers tended to their crops in the black squares, and the sheikh’s people stuck to the white, cutting without conflict like chessboard bishops through the fields. The drought had changed all that. The God-given order was broken, the sheikh said, and he feared the future. “The way the world was set up since time immemorial was being disturbed,” recalled de Waal, now a program director at the Social Science Research Council. “And it was bewildering, depressing, and the consequences were terrible.”

Nearly twenty years later, when a new scourge swept across Darfur, de Waal would remember the meeting. Janjaweed fighters in military uniforms, mounted on camels and horses, laid waste to the region. In a campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting the region’s blacks, the armed militiamen raped women, burned houses, and tortured and killed men of fighting age. Through whole swaths of Darfur, they left only smoke curling into the sky. At their head was a six-foot-four Arab with an athletic build and a commanding presence. In a conflict the United States would call genocide, he topped the State Department’s list of suspected war criminals. De Waal recognized him. His name was Musa Hilal, and he was the sheikh’s son.

On the path from worried elder to militant son lie the roots of a conflict that has forced 2 million mostly black Africans from their homes and killed between 200,000 and 450,000 people. The fighting in Darfur is usually described as racially motivated, pitting mounted Arabs against black rebels and civilians. But the distinction between “Arab” and “black African” in Darfur is defined more by lifestyle than by any physical difference: Arabs are generally herders, Africans typically farmers. The two groups are not racially distinct. Both are predominantly Muslim. The fault lines have their origins in another distinction, between settled farmers and nomadic herders fighting over failing lands. The aggression of the warlord Musa Hilal—forged in a time of desertification, drought, and famine—can be traced to the fears of his father and to how climate change shattered a way of life.

I first visited the region in the spring of 2004, when I traveled to the town of Adré on the eastern edge of Chad and drove three hours south along the Darfurian border. Refugees had been crossing the dry riverbed that formed the frontier and provided the area with its only source of water. It was early morning when I followed a group of women and their mules down into its dry sands. The rising sun made contrails from the dust at their feet. The vegetation was low and scrubby. The women dug broad holes into the bed of the river and pulled out brownish water with plastic jugs. It was dangerous work. The Janjaweed were still active on the other side and had been watering their horses and camels nearby. While their violence was mostly confined to Darfur, the militia had begun to launch cross-border raids in search of cattle that had escaped their assault.

The women had nearly filled their water barrels when two new arrivals dropped from the brush on the far side and fell to their knees in Muslim prayer. They were both women in their fifties, prematurely wrinkled and bent by sun and poverty. When they rose, I asked one to tell me her story. Halime Hassan Osman and her companion had left Chad the night before, risking discovery to return to Darfur and dig in the ruins of their village. They had spent the day in fear, hiding in the bush, too terrified to eat or pray, and returned after another night of fretful walking. The only thing they had found to salvage was a few handfuls of grains and beans. It had been a rough journey, and it seemed strange to me that these two grandmothers had been chosen for the mission. “If the men go, they will kill them,” Halime answered. “If it’s a young woman, they rape her. That’s why it’s us, the old women, who go see.”

The refugees were camped in the high ground just inside Chad, in makeshift shelters of bent reeds and woven grass among the mud houses of a nearby village. On the wall of the local dispensary, the community’s only concrete building, children had used charcoal to draw crude sketches of men and machine guns and planes dribbling bombs.

A fifty-five-year-old man named Bilal Abdulkarim Ibrahim showed me where he had been shot twice while saving his daughters from being raped. “I said, ‘I will die. I cannot let you rape my girls in front of me.’” His attackers had tied a cord around his testicles and pulled, beating his wife when she tried to cut him loose. He only escaped when an older, white-bearded militiaman ordered his release. Fatum Issac Zakaria, a young girl, was seven months pregnant when she and three others were raped during an attack on her village. “We didn’t want to go with them,” she said. “They beat us all the way into the forest. They said, ‘You are the wives of the rebels.’ They insulted us. They said, ‘You are slaves.’” That night as I was leaving, I saw flames rising from inside Sudan. They glowed for about ten minutes, then faded away. It was the Janjaweed, the refugees told me, torching the last of their homes.

Until the rains began to fail, the sheikh’s people had lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomads were welcome passers-through, grazing their camels on the rocky hillsides that separated the fertile plots. The farmers would share their wells, and the herders would feed their stock on the leavings from the harvest. But with the drought, the nomads ranged farther for their food, and the farmers began to fence off their land—even fallow land—for fear it would be ruined by passing herds. Sometimes they’d burn the grass upon which the animals fed. A few tribes drifted elsewhere or took up farming, but the camel-herding Arabs stuck to their fraying...