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[close] DARFUR TESTAMENT
Jennifer Leaning, M.D.

Review of Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur
By Halima Bashir with Damien Lewis
One World Ballantine Books

The people of Darfur have always had trouble being heard, given their remoteness, their dispersal and, even in refuge, their fear of reprisal. Despite the efforts of advocates in the U.S. and the U.K., their voices— particularly those of women—have been slipping even farther into the background.

But now we hear the voice of Dr. Halima Bashir, who draws us into the world from which she came and to which she can never return. Born into the Zaghawa, one of the three main black African tribes of Darfur, she passed her early years in relative tranquillity, protected by a loving family and enveloped in tribal and village traditions of South Darfur. Aside from the pain and sense of betrayal caused by her circumcision, which she describes in unflinching detail, Bashir’s childhood provided everything she would need to endure the years that followed. Her wise and attentive father supported her education, and her own grit and stamina propelled her through the government hierarchy of schools and universities to graduation as a medical doctor from the University of Khartoum.

The flames of war began to flicker at the edges of her homeland, and before she could be fully trained, she was forced back to North Darfur, where her heroic efforts to salvage 40 schoolgirls and a teacher after their gang-rape by the janjaweed proved costly. Captured by the local police and janjaweed, she was punished with beatings and rape for three days and left bleeding and maimed.

She was helped by friends to her home village, only to see it attacked by janjaweed, her adored father killed, her family scattered. To this day she has no word of their fate. She fought her way back to sanity and safety through a terrifying underground escape, ultimately securing asylum in the U.K. with the help of England’s Aegis Trust, an antigenocide organization.

It is from this haven that Bashir traces the pernicious government actions that stoked long-standing socioeconomic tensions into sweeping genocidal attacks. With a physician’s measure, she describes how she cared for war wounded and survived vicious assault. With the voice of a stalwart and honest survivor, she spares little in her own defense and acknowledges with terse yet warm specifics those who sustained her on her path. Read her book to learn about the richly interwoven cultures and livelihoods that once constituted Darfur and to understand how atrocities begin and how, when unchecked, they can become ethnic cleansing.

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JENNIFER LEANING, M.D., is professor of the Practice of International Health in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard University.