THE TRANSLATOR
Daoud Hari
Viking, pbk, $37
Review by Clarke Isaacs
Subtitled A tribesman's memoir of Darfur, this book, with its eye-witness accounts of the barbarities inflicted upon the innocents of Darfur, will surely move some readers to tears.
Daoud Hari, a young Zaghawa tribesman in the Darfur region of Sudan, was in 2003 caught up in the mayhem which descended upon his village when helicopter gunships unleashed their weapons of death upon the inhabitants below.
On the ground, Sudanese army troops and the deadly horseback militia, the Janjaweed, charging on their horses, mopped up.
Many villagers, including Hari, managed to escape but his family suffered heavy losses.
This is just one episode in a complicated civil war (genocide, more accurately) that Hari - whose presence in Chad allowed him to become a translator for roving journalists and international aid groups - recounts in a compellingly simple style.
Of rebel groups, he says it is often difficult to know who is on which side on any given day.
Hari writes of villagers "surrounded, burned alive, massacred from helicopters above and Janjaweed below, with only a few escaping, or few coming from other villages to find everyone dead and the bodies burned in heartbreaking positions; mothers died trying to protect their children and husbands died trying to protect their wives.
Hundreds of thousands were dead.
Millions were homeless".
This courageous young man, who tells of unspeakable acts of violence and of valour in the face of insensate cruelty in a territory much neglected by the outside world, now lives in the United States.
- Clarke Isaacs is a former chief reporter of the Otago Daily Times.
