Free The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari

my citizenship. A few reporters began to arrive, mostly from other African nations, and I wanted to take them into Darfur and show them what was happening. I thought I would need some kind of Chad papers to cross the border with the journalists, so I took some of my remaining camel money and went to see my cousins and friends in N’Djamena, who might help me get papers. That is how I became Suleyman Abakar Moussa of Chad. The little scars on my temples were not important; Zaghawa live in Chad as well as Sudan. It was a little strange that I did not speak French, as Chad people do, but many also speak Arabic, so I could manage.
    It was a risk, and, yes, I remembered the beatings in the Egyptian jails when I was captured after trying to get into Israel. But you should always do what you need to do to be helpful.
    When I was ready to go back to the border area, I went first to one of the big hotels in N’Djamena where the NGOs and reporters often stay when they first come into the area. I had heard that there were journalists there who needed translators to go to the refugee camps and perhaps into Darfur. I was told by a friend who worked in a Chad government ministry to look for a “Dr. John” at the Novotel Hotel. After three days and several trips there and to the other large hotel, I saw some Massalit men I had met in Abéché and who, I knew, spoke some English. The Massalit are a tribe mostly from West Darfur, while my Zaghawa people are mostly in North Darfur, and the Fur are mostlyin South Darfur. The two men were in the Novotel’s coffee shop, talking to a white man at their table. I went up to them and, in Arabic, asked,
Who is this white man of yours? Who is this hawalya?
That is a not-unkind word for a white person. They explained that this man was looking for translators to go to the camps, and they were going with him. Also, he needed a Zaghawa translator. It seems we had been looking for each other.
    “Dr. John, I presume?” is how I introduced myself to him, which I thought was pretty good.
    He was not exactly a journalist. He had arrived with people from the United Nations and the U.S. State Department to interview refugees and make a legal determination if a genocide was occurring. If it was not technically a genocide and was instead a more ordinary civil war, that would call for a different international response. For killings to be considered a genocide, the victims have to be targeted because of their ethnic identity.
    Dr. John, a young American who looked to be in his late twenties, with blond hair and a bushy beard, said that he was not a doctor, but that this was his nickname. He was glad to meet this Suleyman Abakar Moussa from Chad who spoke Zaghawa, Arabic, and English. After his many questions, he asked if I would be one of their translators for this investigation into possible crimes of genocide. Yes, I would do that. I had found my fate.

10.
Sticks for Shade
    Our caravan of white vehicles, the genocide investigation team, was waved through an army checkpoint at the Breidjing refugee camp on Chad’s eastern border with Sudan. It was one of about ten such camps along the border at the time.
    The horizon ahead was fluttering with plastic tarps and little rags tied to sticks for shade. There were shredded green tents and torn white plastic sheeting wrapped around more sticks to serve as tattered roofs and walls. Where the road lifted a bit, this thin line of twirling rags was revealed as a vast city of desperation, as if all the poverty and sadness of the world came from one endless storage yard somewhere, and here it was. This camp had tripled in new souls during the few weeks I had been away. The thinnest shelters flapped everywhere in the wind now. Some were the torn canvas remnants from Rwanda and Sierra Leone and other previous tragedies, rewoven nowinto a miserable twig and rag nest for thirty thousand birds of passage.
    The sight of so many people suffering pushed my own troubles from my