After El-Fasher

It is hardly surprising that people dance during war. Sometimes these are dances of victory. This past October, after eighteen months of siege, the city of El-Fasher in North Darfur fell to the Janjaweed—the nickname of the government-aligned Arab militias who razed Darfur twenty years ago, now widely used for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces who succeeded them and have been fighting their former backers in the regular army since 2023. When the news broke, footage circulated of fighters dancing to celebrate in Nyala, a city in South Darfur that they had occupied since the beginning of Sudan’s bloody, three-year-long war.

But there is another kind of dance you might see in Darfur today: the dance of those who survived massacres, who celebrate staying alive even as they mourn loved ones—family members, friends, classmates, neighbors—and reckon with the loss of their homes, their possessions, their livestock, all but their memories. By dancing they forge a kind of noble, sorrowful equilibrium that might help them go on living or escape once again.

Jérôme Tubiana captures one such dance in his latest pictures from Tawila, a town in North Darfur now reportedly sheltering 800,000 internally displaced people (IDPs). Most of those people fled the massacres in El-Fasher. They escaped in carts pulled by donkeys or trucks that belong to the very gunmen who attacked them—paying extortionate sums for the ride—and with the full consent of officers: one of the Janjaweed’s aims in the Darfur war is to empty cities, towns, and villages of their inhabitants so that their Arab kinsmen can take their place.

Over the past three years civilians across Sudan have been killed and displaced at an unimaginable scale; the country’s farmland, water sources, and other natural resources have been devastated. But many of the soldiers too are victims, simply because they did not start the war and indeed never had the power to. This was a war begun by politicians squabbling over wealth and power, who resorted to weapons to secure what they could not achieve by peaceful means, then shirked responsibility. Living with their families in the lap of luxury, abroad and out of reach, they hardly allow their consciences to be troubled by the destruction and the displacement, the rape and the killing perpetrated by the men they send to the front lines on their behalf.

Tubiana is especially concerned with portraying the women and children whose blood is the price of the victors’ victories and the defeats of the defeated, yet who have no say in political affairs and do not understand why the politicians are fighting, what they are fighting over, and when they will stop. This is not to simplify the causes of the war, and Tubiana does not take photos at random; behind every picture is a story about power and money, culture and identity, social and racial inequalities, war and peace. When I saw his photos of wounded people in Tawila leaning on sticks, I remembered the soldiers who had been forgotten when they left active service, no longer of use to anyone: dumped in charity hospitals, handed over to the care of their families, or left to find their way to IDP camps to chew over their memories and share their regrets.

The problem with soldiers is that they themselves cannot answer the questions that will save them from the inferno. Why are we fighting? For whom? And until when? Why are we killing people with whom we have no personal grievances—indeed people we’ve never even seen before? The philosopher Hannah Arendt once argued that violence often results from the fact that some people have an “inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else”—an apt description of the way our narrow-minded politicians condone carnage while vaunting their commitment to peace and love. Thinking today requires not looking away from Darfur.

—Translated by Katharine Halls