{"id":84,"date":"2010-05-11T01:56:18","date_gmt":"2010-05-11T01:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thanassiscambanis.com\/sipa\/?p=84"},"modified":"2010-05-11T01:56:18","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T01:56:18","slug":"forensics-of-darfur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thanassiscambanis.com\/sipa\/2010\/05\/forensics-of-darfur\/","title":{"rendered":"Forensics of Darfur"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>BY SABRINA MONDSCHEIN<\/p>\n

What Mohammed Ahmed did in Darfur did not sound revolutionary, but it may have cost him the chance to return home.\u00a0 One by one, he and a handful of colleagues at their Nyala clinic documented each case they saw.\u00a0 The simple act of systematically documenting the torture meant that they are records that the group saved in their computers, of what Bashir\u2019s men had done.<\/p>\n

Last year, authorities answering to President Umar al-Bashir ransacked Dr. Ahmed\u2019s home in Nyala, South Darfur, they did not harm his wife or neighbors. His eight children were busy at school, the older ones persuing pursuing degrees in medicine and engineering.\u00a0 They were looking for Dr. Ahmed, whom they blamed for the president\u2019s indictment at the International Criminal Court in March 2009.<\/p>\n

Did Dr. Ahmed\u2019s work contribute to Bashir\u2019s indictment?\u00a0 He pauses over lunch at a small caf\u00e9 in Cambridge, where he now lives, and then casually says, \u201cMaybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over a five-year period, Dr. Ahmed helped treat over 500 victims of rape and torture at the hands the Janjaweed, the Darfur-based militia group focused on driving members of the Fur tribe out of Sudan.\u00a0 Dr. Ahmed and his colleagues painstakingly documented each case along the way, recording them in their computers.<\/p>\n

When the authorities came to his home in 2009, Dr. Ahmed was in the United States.\u00a0 The Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Center for Justice and Human Rights had honored him in 2007 with the Human Rights Award.\u00a0 He traveled to the U.S. on their invitation to pursue funding for his programs in Darfur.<\/p>\n

The plan was to go, secure financial support, then return home to his wife and his projects.\u00a0\u00a0 After the authorities ransacked his home, however, his friends told him to stay away.\u00a0 The RFK center helped him secure a fellowship at Harvard where he now conducts research on public health and takes classes to learn about the U.S. medical system.\u00a0 It has been over a year since he saw his family.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ahmed is a small man with dark skin and a bright, wide smile.\u00a0 He greets his \u201cguest,\u201d as he refers to his interviewer, at the Harvard Square T-stop after eagerly phoning to make his guest arrived safely.\u00a0 He wears a black skullcap covering his bald head, a stripped collar shirt, grey pants and shiny black loafers. He sports a simple silver digital Casio watch.\u00a0 He escorts his guest to the Algiers Caf\u00e9 nearby and pauses for a long time before he speaks.<\/p>\n

He says that when the war broke out in 2003, \u201cthe top [rebel] leader is one of my patients, and I have a good relation with his family, and he sent me a letter. So that was one of the shocks for me, because the community is not ready for war.\u201d In response to \u201cviolations,\u201d says Dr. Ahmed, the government declared war.\u00a0 They did not target the rebels; they first targeted civilians.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s a big decision; the decision of war is one of the difficult things.\u201d Dr. Ahmed often references \u201cthe difficult things\u201d as he talks.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ahmed would rather talk about the war, his proposals for peace, and American policy than about his own story.\u00a0 A waitress comes and has a hard time understanding him. \u201cNo!\u201d he booms when she thinks he told her that he was not ready to order.\u00a0 He smiles, stops trying to explain and simply points to his guest.\u00a0 After more prodding, and not until he has gone over his timeline, does Dr. Ahmed begin to tell his own story.<\/p>\n

He was born in Jebel Marra in west Darfur.\u00a0 He is part of the Fur tribe, Sudan\u2019s largest.\u00a0 When he was five, he joined his older brother walking roughly 70 kilometers, three days, to get to school.\u00a0 Villages along the way would host the boys, free of charge.\u00a0 He and his brother lived in dorms the rest of the semester.\u00a0 Their parents stayed home, in their village. They never went to school and they never liked going into town.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ahmed earned a medical degree from the University of Khartoum Medical School and later taught medicine at Al-Fashir University in Darfur.\u00a0 He is the first doctor from his village.\u00a0 During breaks from medical school, he did not go home to visit his family.\u00a0 Instead, he travelled to other communities in Sudan to mentor other men in hopes that they, too, would join the medical field.\u00a0 Slowly, these communities started to see him as a leader.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ahmed began worked with victims of the Janjaweed attacks through the Amel Center.\u00a0 In Sudan, \u201cnobody likes to say she is raped.\u00a0 She will be divorced.\u00a0 If she\u2019s younger, she will be killed by her elders. The simple thing is she will just be rejected by the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

In what turned out to be a revolutionary innovation, Dr. Ahmed and his colleagues decided to treat rape cases with the same confidentiality that Sudanese doctors would treat cancer or heart disease.\u00a0 Hundreds of otherwise silent women then came to them.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ahmed knew the records of cases would be highly contested, but he and his colleagues wanted proof of \u201cthe unbelievable.\u201d The actual statistics are highly contested.\u00a0 In 2006, Science<\/em> magazine reported that the U.S. State Department underestimated the death toll by hundreds of thousands.\u00a0 Dr. Ahmed cannot speak to the total count, but he says that Bashir himself says that only 10,000 died.\u00a0 \u201cThat is the number he confessed.\u00a0 If the perpetrator confessed that it was only 10,000, what do you think the actual number would be?\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Dr. Ahmed\u2019s biggest concern is what his life choices mean for his parents.\u00a0 They are around 80 and 90 years old. If his family joins him, \u201cit will be better for them \u2026 but who will take care of my parents?\u201d<\/p>\n

He stays for over two hours with his interviewer, inquiring into her studies and career path, waiting before his guest\u2019s ride arrives, making sure everyone is well and then he quietly pays the bill and leaves.