Nothing is as we are told in Sudan's killing fields
DARFUR. The ambiguous genocide. Gerard Prunier. 176pp. Hurst. Pounds 15.95. - 1
8506 5770 X.
US: Cornell University Press. $24. - 0 8014 4450 0.
Ahmat Acyl Aghbash is known about by few, and then mostly for his grisly end: he stepped backwards into the spinning propellers of his Cessan aeroplane in 1982.
The plane was a gift from Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi; for ten years, Ahmat Acyl was both a commander in Libya's multinational pan-Sahelian "Islamic Legion" and the leader of a Chadian Arab militia known as the Volcano Brigade.
Today, Acyl's fighters from the Salamat of south- central Chad, and the Sudanese intermediaries who smuggled their weapons, can stake a good claim to be the original Janjawiid -the Sudan Government-backed militia now infamous for genocidal atrocity in Darfur.
Acyl's name crops up in most histories of the long-running wars between Libya, Chad and Sudan. His supplier's name doesn't. It was Sheikh Hilal Mohamed Abdalla, whose Um Jalul clan's yearly migration routes took them from the edge of the Libyan desert in Northern Darfur to the upper reaches of the Salamat River where it crosses from Sudan into Chad. Renowned for their traditionalism, their camels and the vast reach of their semi-nomadism, the Um Jalul were a logical intermediary for Libya's gun-running. Their encounter with the Salamat militia, first social, then commercial and finally military, forged the Janjawiid, which is now headed by the Sheikh's younger son, Musa Hilal.
Acyl preached an Arab supremacist ideology, advocating the rule of the lineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and his Koreish tribe over Muslim lands.
