Sven Torfinn for The New York Times
People who fled the Darfur region of Sudan amid brutal attacks are coming back. A Darfurian in Nyuru, peacekeepers behind her.
NYURU, Sudan ? More than 100,000 people in Darfur have left the sprawling camps where they had taken refuge for nearly a decade and headed home to their villages over the past year, the biggest return of displaced people since the war began in 2003 and a sign that one of the world?s most infamous conflicts may have decisively cooled.
The millions of civilians who fled into camps, their homes often reduced to nothing more than rings of ash by armed raiders, are among the most haunting legacies of the conflict in Darfur, transforming this rural landscape into a collection of swollen impromptu squatter towns.
And while the many thousands going home are only a small fraction of Darfur?s total displaced population, they are doing so voluntarily, United Nations officials say, offering one of the most concrete signs of hope this war-weary region has seen in years.
?It?s amazing,? said Dysane Dorani, head of the United Nations peacekeeping mission for the western sector of Darfur. ?The people are coming together. It reminds me of Lebanon after the civil war.?
If ever there was a ghost town, it was the village of Nyuru, on a windswept hill in western Darfur, where countless people were gunned down by men on horseback or stabbed with crude little daggers when this region of Sudan exploded in bloodshed in 2003. After that, everybody fled, and they stayed away for years.
But on a recent morning, thousands of Nyuru?s residents were back on their land doing all the things they used to do, scrubbing clothes, braiding hair, sifting grain and preparing for a joint feast of farmers and nomads. Former victims and former perpetrators would later sit down side by side together, some for the first time since Darfur?s war broke out, sharing plates of macaroni and millet ? and even the occasional dance ? in a gesture of informal reconciliation.
After all the years of international diplomacy, sanctions, billions of dollars spent on peacekeepers and an extremely well-oiled advocacy machine that elevated Darfur into a worldwide cause c�l�bre, attracting the likes of George Clooney and Mia Farrow, parts of Darfur finally appear to be turning around, for a few reasons.
The most obvious is that Sudan recently made peace with Chad, securing a border that used to be crawling with proxy forces and militiamen toting bazookas. Western aid groups are now trying to capitalize on this, partially shifting away from emergency aid and increasing funds for what they call ?recovery,? providing brave pioneers with all the essentials they need to go home and stay home, like seeds, wells, plows and workshops to make plows. Even the death of Libya?s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has had ripples ? good ripples, people here say.
Colonel Qaddafi used to supply guns to Darfurian rebels, part of his meddling across this patch of Africa. Now that he is gone, the rebels are weaker, with some more in the mood to negotiate, as evidenced by a recent peace treaty signed by one rebel faction.
Of course, all is not well in Darfur. More than two million people remain stuck in internal displacement or refugee camps, and some rebel groups fight on. But people who have been victimized and traumatized are sensing a change in the air and acting on it, risking their lives and the lives of their children to leave the relative safety of the camps to venture back to where loved ones were killed.
Abdallah Mohamed Abubakir, a skinny farmer, just brought his family back to Nyuru.
?Things aren?t great,? he said, ?but they?re getting better.?
A quick glance around Nyuru illuminates what he means. The village school may be six sagging grass-walled huts ? but it is a new school. The village hospital is one large dusty tent ? but it is also new, paid for by an Islamic charity.
Not far away are smashed houses and traces of ash on the ground, the footprints of the violence nine years ago, almost as if the land itself was quietly saying: people were killed here, many, many people.
But, at the same time, there is a new police station standing on a hill, with a fresh coat of high-gloss blue, and there are no reports of major violence.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ba70cd8a99760cc282d8ba190f994c3c
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