ANNOUNCER: Tonight on FRONTLINE/World, three stories from a small planet.

 

In Iraq, 54 journalists have died since the war began, nearly the number of reporters killed in Vietnam.

 

NICK HUGHES, Reporter: I'm just going to put on my body armor.

 

ANNOUNCER: Correspondent Nick Hughes finds that for reporters now, most of Iraq is a no-go zone. Targeted by insurgents, embedded with the military, it's getting hard to tell the real story.

 

JOHN BURNS, The New York Times: Every lie, every restriction tells another truth.

 

ANNOUNCER: Next, in Sudan, one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, two million refugees in camps like these.

 

AMY COSTELLO, Reporter: Were your houses burned because of what dropped from the sky?

 

ANNOUNCER: Correspondent Amy Costello investigates a war the U.S. is calling genocide.

 

And finally, a journey to western China, where Muslims are afraid to speak out and one man is arrested for telling his story to reporter Serene Fang.

 

SERENE FANG, Reporter: It's important to get the truth out there, but the price was very high and I didn't have to pay it.

 

 

 

Iraq: Reporting the War

Reported by: Nick Hughes

 

 

NICK HUGHES, Reporter: [voice-over] In my 15 years of filming, I've worked in many war zones. This is my second trip to Iraq. These days, the flight from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad is pretty empty- a few Iraqi businessmen, one or two security contractors and a couple of fellow reporters.

 

CAPTAIN: There is Baghdad, just behind my shoulder now.

 

NICK HUGHES: Insurgents surround the Baghdad airport. They will fire rockets and missiles at planes attempting to land.

 

CAPTAIN: Once we are cleared for the descent [unintelligible] we will start the spiral.

 

NICK HUGHES: A gradual descent would make us an easy target. A corkscrew dive is our only way in. We descend roughly 8,000 feet in 30 seconds. I can only hope they know what they're doing.

 

I manage to arrive at the Hamra late afternoon. It's one of three hotels in Baghdad that house journalists.

 

HOTEL REGISTRAR: How was your trip?

 

NICK HUGHES: It was Very nice. Dramatic airplane- the landing at Baghdad.

 

[voice-over] When the war began, there were over 2,000 journalists in Iraq. The pool at the Hamra used to be a popular hangout. It's empty now.

 

At the moment, most journalists are embedded with the military. I bump into an old friend of mine, Scott Peterson from Getty Images. He just returned from an embed in Fallujah. He hasn't showered in 30 days and is clearly running on adrenaline.

 

SCOTT PETERSON: Well, this- I mean, this is just a pile of clothes that now is really beyond the pale. It's the trousers that were on for 25, 26 or 27 days. It's very heavy. It's very old. It's never let me down.

 

So you can put- with this one, you literally just clip it on like that because, of course, if this thing drops off your shoulder, it's game over. This also is the first conflict I've actually used this crotch protector. There was so much metal flying around this time.

 

This number, there's a bit of it left on my wrist, and it's on here and on my helmet, as well, is- they call this a "kill number," so that if something happens to you- there's also my blood type there, B-positive. If something happens to you, instead of calling in and saying, "Scott Peterson's been," you know, "blasted," you know, like, "Who's that?" "Peterson- P-E-T"- you know, they literally can say, "Xray 96 has been wounded," or this or that's happened.

 

NICK HUGHES: Peterson, who also writes for The Christian Science Monitor, tells me that the hotel is a dangerous place. Just a few months ago, rockets were fired at the Hamra, and two reporters were kidnapped at gunpoint right outside.

 

SCOTT PETERSON: It really raised tension a lot. It meant that we were making decisions every single day about how far we'd go, how far we'd go out, who we talk to, who we don't, where we meet people. So every day is high risk and high tension.

 

NICK HUGHES: For some months now, journalists have complained about how impossible their jobs have become. One reporter wrote home, "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest." The email made it onto the Internet and brought home just how bad things have become.

 

Alissa Rubin, with The LA Times, has been here since March 2003. For the past few days, Rubin has been trying to set up a visit to a predominantly Shia neighborhood in Baghdad.

 

ALISSA RUBIN, LA Times: We sort of have two bad choices. You either go through this area, which is Haifa Street, where there is bombing and shooting, or-

 

NICK HUGHES: She's allowed me to come along, but there are a few conditions.

 

[on camera] What I'm going to do is taken my hidden camera. There it is. That way, at least I'll be able to document my journey through the Shia compound.

 

[voice-over] And I can't show what she looks like when she's veiled. The concern is that once this program airs, someone might recognize her disguise.

 

ALISSA RUBIN: Leaving the hotel is the most dangerous thing we do every day.

 

The lower you can keep the camera in the car, the better, obviously.

 

NICK HUGHES: [on camera] How do you feel your security-

 

ALISSA RUBIN: Well, I feel quite insecure with you in the car today with the camera.

 

NICK HUGHES: [voice-over] Journalists leaving the hotel have been followed, dragged out of their cars and kidnapped.

 

ALISSA RUBIN: You have to do everything you can to be as inconspicuous as possible. I don't really look Iraqi, even wearing a veil, but when you're driving at 30, 40 miles an hour, no one's going to really see, either.

 

NICK HUGHES: With the hidden camera, I follow her. Few journalists walk the streets of Baghdad. Even fewer would take this risk just to get a few quotes and some color for their story.

 

Her work this day led to a front-page story in The LA Times about the upcoming elections. "In the Kadhimiya neighborhood of Baghdad," she wrote, "there are gold sellers and large cloth shops catering to Iranian pilgrims. Fliers urging people to vote cover the walls. One flier read, ŒNo to dictatorship. No to foreign occupation.'"

 

RORY McCARTHY, The Guardian: A British convoy? OK. What makes you think it's British?

 

NICK HUGHES: Rory McCarthy is a correspondent with the British Guardian.

 

RORY McCARTHY: OK. And was anyone hurt?

 

NICK HUGHES: That's his Iraqi Stringer, Osama, calling.

 

RORY McCARTHY: All right. Thanks, Osama. Thanks.

 

NICK HUGHES: [on camera] What's happened?

 

RORY McCARTHY: So he said a British convoy- well, he thinks there's a British convoy that's just been hit by some kind of bomb on the Jadriyah bridge. The traffic's heavy.

 

NICK HUGHES: A bombing has delayed Osama's return. McCarthy will have to go to meet him.

 

RORY McCARTHY: Many of these things we just don't hear about, particularly in towns outside Baghdad. It's incredibly difficult for us to get independent news from these places. It's too dangerous for us to go.

 

NICK HUGHES: Many journalists will only travel in a bulletproof car. McCarthy prefers to travel discreetly.

 

RORY McCARTHY: I'm very reluctant to have guys with guns with us. We don't have any guns in this car. We don't have any guards with guns working for us. At the end of the day, we're journalists. I think we should be unarmed.

 

When you're dealing with a country that has front lines, you know where the danger begins. There is a front line that you go to, and when you get there, you know that you're in a dangerous area and you can take steps to- you know, to protect yourself. The problem here is that there's no front lines. So more and more, I'm asking Osama, my translator, to go to those slightly more tricky places and do some of the work for me.

 

NICK HUGHES: McCarthy has shared his byline with Osama five times. He can't get the story without an Iraqi like Osama helping him. But it's risky. Ten Iraqi stringers have been killed since 2003. Many are targeted because they work for Westerners.

 

OSAMA MANSOUR: I like working with tough people, and I think you journalists are really tough. It's a little bit dangerous. For me, I say a little bit. But a lot of people say it's really dangerous. You need to be smart. Like, that's it. You just need to use your mind. Like now, I'm thinking of all the situations. I'm looking in the mirrors, I'm looking at all that, and I'm talking to you. Like, that's the way to do it. You just have to keep your eyes open.

 

You're going to die someday. Why don't we skip the thing about getting killed? You won't make any money if you think like that. You won't live your life. You will die if you keep thinking about death and death and death, if you keep thinking about security, if you keep thinking about all these things. You will get killed someday.

 

So what do we have for tomorrow?

 

[www.pbs.org: More on Iraqi "fixers"]

 

NICK HUGHES: Every day in Iraq is a gamble. Mazen al Tumeizi, a correspondent with Al Arabiyya, was reporting from the center of Baghdad.

 

MAZEN AL TUMEIZI: [subtitles] The Americans promised beautiful dreams, but the reality is different. The streets of Iraq have been transformed into a war zone.

 

[subtitles] Can we do this again?

 

NICK HUGHES: Then U.S. helicopters fired two missiles. Seconds later, al Tumeizi would become the 33rd journalist to die in Iraq.

 

MAZEN AL TUMEIZI: [subtitles] I'm dying! I'm dying. Seif! Seif!

 

NICK HUGHES: His cameraman, Seif Fouad, filmed him dying.

 

SEIF FOUAD: [subtitles] We were colleagues and friends for a few years. Our friendship got deeper, and it's not simple to forget.

 

NICK HUGHES: Fouad now works for Reuters, the world's largest news agency. They supply text, pictures and video to other media organizations. Since the war began, they've lost three cameramen.

 

SEIF FOUAD: [subtitles] Every day when I wake up, I hope nothing bad will happen. But I also wish to work, and my work is to film bombings.

 

NICK HUGHES: Fouad's boss, Khalid Ramani, is in charge of sending crews out into the field and doesn't want to lose any more.

 

KHALID RAMANI: I don't want to feel guilty, one day I send this cameraman to do this, and to lose him. They know I'm saying to them, "Please be careful. Don't put yourself in the middle of problems or these things." You know, I don't want him one day to take decision and to lose him, even, you know, for one picture or, I mean, for big exclusive on this thing.

 

NICK HUGHES: Thirty-five Iraqi journalists have died since the war began, most killed by U.S. gunfire, more in recent months, a trend that reflects it's the Iraqis that are working the story for Western news organizations.

 

NEWSCASTER: Iraqi police found the bodies of CNN's translator/producer, Duraid Isa Mohammed-

 

NICK HUGHES: For Western journalists, April 2004 was one of the toughest months. Around the time American security contractors were hung from a bridge in Falluja, seven journalists were kidnapped. John Burns of The New York Times was held for six hours by the Mehdi Army.

 

JOHN BURNS: Five vehicles descended on us. We were pulled from our vehicle-

 

NICK HUGHES: In August, a bad situation got worse. Five more journalists were abducted. Two French reporters were held for four months. Italian Enzo Baldoni was beheaded. Since the war began, 19 foreign journalists have died. Journalists now live behind blast walls and barricades. They've stopped traveling around the country. They hardly leave their compounds.

 

The only way to get out into the field is to sign up for an embed. Generally, all it takes is one email to some lieutenant. A few days later, you're in a sardine can, bumping along Highway 1.

 

JOHN BURNS: So we go to war.

 

NICK HUGHES: That's John Burns of The New York Times, his photographer, Jason Howe, and Alastair MacDonald of Reuters. We're headed to a military base south of Baghdad, an area the U.S. military has recently started calling "the triangle of death."

 

MILITARY BRIEFER: This is forward operating base Kalsu, home of the headquarters of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

 

NICK HUGHES: Before we head out on an operation, we are greeted with an hour-long Powerpoint presentation.

 

ALASTAIR MACDONALD, Reuters: They may have an interest in persuading us that things are going better than it is, I suppose. But at the same time, they presumably don't have much interest in deceiving themselves about how things are going. You always have to remember that you're getting one side of the story, and it's a very convincing narrative. When we are able to check these things, sometimes it looks rather different from the other side.

 

JACKIE SPINNER, The Washington Post: I'm completely reliant on the military to tell me their perspective. I'm relying on our Iraqi stringers to tell me. I can't be my own eyes and ears anywhere, and that's very frustrating.

 

NICK HUGHES: Jackie Spinner is with The Washington Post. She's trying to file her story with a satellite hook-up called an RBGAN.

 

JACKIE SPINNER: Just having like cable or DSL. I mean, there are still places where you're going to be in a black hole, and apparently, the triangle of death is one of them. My editors are not sensitive to this. Yesterday, I took advantage of the hour I had in this truck to interview the driver for what I call my "soldier moment" stories, and I'm getting ready to send them my photographs. I like these "soldier moment" stories. I like walking into a room and saying to the soldiers, "Who wants to be famous?"

 

NICK HUGHES: We head out at dawn the next day. The Marines are looking for insurgents on the banks of the Euphrates. We've been told there are 600 in the area. We disembark on something that resembles quicksand.

 

MARINE: Mind your computer. Hold it up above your head.

 

NICK HUGHES: New York Times veteran Burns, who's 20 years older than all of us, is stuck up to his waist.

 

JOHN BURNS: Every time I get on the plane to come back here, my friends tell me - and I think, to some extent myself - I must be crazy. But then I get my boots on the ground, and I think I'm not crazy after all.

 

NICK HUGHES: We begin a five-hour tramp across palm groves and irrigation canals.

 

JOHN BURNS: It's a curiosity of this war that, in some ways, the safest place to be is embedded at the front. This is a more rugged form of journalism. We have to use our experience, and we have to widen the aperture all the time.

 

NICK HUGHES: It's a 14-hour day for us. Burns remarks that war is 90 percent tedium and 10 percent terror. It's been a bit of both. After finding three Kalashnikovs - and bizarrely, a bag which we were told contained a severed head - we return to base camp.

 

MARINE: Can we get a target indication?

 

NICK HUGHES: On the way, the truck in front of us is attacked. I turned my camera on after the explosion.

 

MARINE: Can we get a target indication?

 

NICK HUGHES: Burns stayed up late into the night filing a story about Iraq- and that other war. "Vietnam," he wrote, "is rarely mentioned among the troops. It is considered a bad talisman among those men and women who privately admit to fears that this war could be lost."

 

The New York Times keeps half a dozen reporters in Iraq at any given time. This is Dexter Filkins. He just returned from a two-week embed in Falluja. He tells me he slept on the run and had to file from a latrine to avoid attracting gunfire. Filkins was with a company of 150 Marines from the 1st Battalion. A quarter of his company was killed or wounded during that offensive.

 

DEXTER FILKINS, The New York Times: From the moment that we got out of the troop carriers and walked into of the city - and that was about 8:00 PM - the RPGs were sailing out of town, exploding right next to us. And everybody was on the ground, trying to take cover. And I thought, "My God, what have I signed up for?" We had continuous combat for 16 hours.

 

NICK HUGHES: Filkins observed that the siege of Falluja marked the first time since the Vietnam war that journalists witnessed combat so close up. He filed 16 stories from the front line.

 

DEXTER FILKINS: It was really intense. I mean, it made everything else I've covered look like a tea party. You know, I'm a writer, and words failed me repeatedly.

 

NICK HUGHES: "It was a qualitatively different experience," he wrote, "a leap into a different kind of battle. The noise and the feel of the battle seemed altogether extraordinary; at other times, hardly real at all."

 

DEXTER FILKINS: It's like I'm so wired that it's going to take a while. I'm not even excited about leaving.

 

NICK HUGHES: Filkins is on the way to Istanbul for a two-week break. Armed guards will escort him to the airport. What lies ahead is one of Iraq's most dangerous roads.

 

DEXTER FILKINS: It's about a mile long, this little block of road, and it gets attacked every day. This is really the worst stretch of road right here. Just the other day, my other colleague that was with me in Falluja-

 

SECURITY GUARD: Watch this BMW on the right-hand side! Push right to the left. Go right to the left-hand side.

 

NICK HUGHES: The chances of being ambushed are high. In the last month, there have been 15 suicide bombings on this stretch.

 

SECURITY GUARD: Tell the guys to keep an eye on them.

 

NICK HUGHES: The guy next to Filkins has been hired by The Times as a bodyguard for around $2,000 a day.

 

DEXTER FILKINS: Whew! The other day, my colleague went there, went to the airport, and I think he had to drive through one car bombing and then through a gun battle. They tried once, came back, and then decided to try it again, and they got through. It took a long time. That's what you go through every day on this road. But it's just such a measure of how troubled this whole enterprise is that 19 months into this thing, we can't really drive to the airport, you know, with any degree of assurance. And it's only a couple miles down the road.

 

NICK HUGHES: As of this airing, there are roughly 200 foreign journalists still working in Iraq.

 

 

 

ANNOUNCER: Later, a story from China that changed a reporter's life.

 

SERENE FANG, Reporter: I think about his wife, his children. And what are they going to do?

 

ANNOUNCER: But first, a dramatic and dangerous journey into a desert war.

 

 

Sudan: The Quick and the Terrible

Reported by: Amy Costello

 

 

AMY COSTELLO, PRI's The World, Reporter: [voice-over] Flying over the remote deserts of Darfur, the first thing you notice are the villages burned and abandoned. There are hundreds of them. With 70,000 dead and more than a million people forced into sprawling camps, the situation in Darfur is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. And it's entirely man-made. The United States, in fact, has called it genocide. I've come to find out why the violence has been so difficult to stop.

 

At the airport in El Fasher, I find peacekeepers ready to deploy in Darfur. They're not from the U.S. or the U.N., but from the African union.

 

[on camera] So this must be a good day for you, to see that there are so many troops here now finally and able to be deployed?

 

AFRICAN UNION OFFICER: Yeah, it's good. It's good. When they are deployed out there, we are happy because they came here-

 

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] Only two years old, the African Union was created to promote peace and security on the continent. While the world watched and waited and debated what to do in Darfur, only the AU was willing to step in. So far, there are just some 800 AU troops to monitor an area the size of France. Darfur is their first big test.

 

AFRICAN UNION OFFICER: In the next 10 minutes, they should be airborne and coming your direction.

 

AMY COSTELLO: These troops are headed west, closer to the heart of the crisis. We meet up with them the next morning at the new African Union base in Kabkabiyah, then head out on patrol. It doesn't take long before we see one of the villages set afire by the Janjaweed, the Arab fighters who have been killing and driving people off their land.

 

AU OFFICER: [subtitles] Have people returned yet? Where are they?

 

AMY COSTELLO: The patrol stops to talk to some men who have been hiding in the mountains for months since the Janjaweed first struck.

 

VILLAGER: [subtitles] In the first attack, the Janjaweed killed eight people. Then we found nine more burned in their houses.

 

AMY COSTELLO: The man says that the Janjaweed struck again months later, killing more people, looting livestock, and poisoning the wells so the villagers wouldn't return.

 

AU OFFICER: The government came with the Janjaweed, and they beat them and threw them out of the village. So they are afraid to come back because of that.

 

AMY COSTELLO: Darfur means "Land of the Fur Tribe." For years, the Fur and others farmed on this land, and Arab nomads grazed their livestock. Then drought struck, and fights over land grew more bitter and bloody. The government sided with the Arab nomads, and groups like the Janjaweed became more bold in their grabs for land.

 

The patrol rolls through a marketplace that's been deserted since the Janjaweed attacked. One man named Abdullah has tried to hang on here.

 

ABDULLAH: [subtitles] It's very sad. They came and burned everything and took what was left. Now there is nothing here.

 

AMY COSTELLO: Abdullah said a 130 families used to live here. Now many of them live in camps like this. In just more than a year, some two million people have been pushed out of their homes by attacks. The Red Cross and other international aid groups are doing what they can to manage widespread malnutrition and disease. It's estimated that 5,000 to 10,000 people die each month in the camps and in the villages.

 

People here want to return home to farm, but it's still not safe. A woman named Fatima tells me that the Janjaweed and government soldiers rape women who leave the camp to gather firewood.

 

FATIMA: [subtitles] We're afraid for our lives. We're scared of everyone. How can we know who is who? They are all wearing khaki and killing people. It must be the government. Who else could they be? And the Janjaweed are wearing the same thing.

 

The Janjaweed kill you and take what is yours. Right in front of you, they'll kill your husband, kill your son, your mother, your brother.

 

AMY COSTELLO: Many people here say the Janjaweed attacked their homes, but these two sisters said the assault on their village came from the sky.

 

1st SISTER: [subtitles] We were farming, and we heard gunfire. We went up to our village, and it was in flames. We couldn't go in, so we waited and waited. At 5:00, the planes and cars left. All that remained was smoke.

 

AMY COSTELLO: [on camera] Were your houses burned because of what dropped from the sky, or were your houses burned because people came into the town and burned them?

 

2nd SISTER: [subtitles] No, nobody came in, just the planes. Just the planes. I found part of a bomb as big as my arm. One bomb landed in my house. Another exploded inside my uncle's house. The planes dropped the bombs.

 

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] This is truly alarming, the Sudanese air force bombing its own people. They say they do it to root out rebels, but it's civilians they're harming.

 

The African Union troops are not empowered to stop the attacks. Aside from a small protection force, they patrol Darfur unarmed. Back at the AU base in Kabkabiyah, I get a briefing from a South African officer. He talks first about the Janjaweed. Then he mentions a rebel army.

 

SOUTH AFRICAN OFFICER: The problem that we have in this area is that this whole area is controlled by the SLA rebels. So they've got quite a big force here.

 

AMY COSTELLO: The rebels are central to the present Darfur crisis. Two years ago, they attacked the government airport at El Fasher, killing 100 soldiers and triggering the government crackdown that has raised the question of genocide.

 

SOUTH AFRICAN OFFICER: I don't have any idea what's happening in this area.

 

AMY COSTELLO: We'd been briefed on the dangers of traveling to rebel territory. The next day, we set off for the rebels anyway. The main rebel group calls itself the Sudanese Liberation Army, or SLA, a grand name for a group that initially wasn't that well-armed or well-organized. In the last few years, the SLA has set up more bases like this one in the town of Labado. And they've picked up more recruits. We meet an 18-year-old boy who says he joined the SLA after the Janjaweed attacked his village.

 

SLA RECRUIT: [subtitles] There were groups in the street, and they took people and threw them in fires. They even threw babies into the fire.

 

[www.pbs.org: More on the SLA]

 

AMY COSTELLO: After four hours on the road, we reached the rebel base in Muhajiriya. The men here are heavily armed. Some say they get their guns from neighboring countries looking to destabilize Sudan. The rebel leader here is Commander Hassan. He takes me on a tour of newly rebel-controlled territory. The SLA fighters wear amulets to protect themselves in battle. They also carry satellite phones to coordinate their operations.

 

While we were there, the SLA had stepped up its activities- kidnappings, hit-and-run attacks, killing local police, even disrupting aid convoys to their own villages. Commander Hassan says it's all necessary to fight a government bent on destroying his people.

 

CMDR HASSAN: [subtitles] If the government was only trying to kill SLA soldiers, then they should target only the SLA. But they are killing civilians and throwing them in fires. And this is evidence that they government is conducting an ethnic cleansing of Africans in Darfur.

 

AMY COSTELLO: Commander Hassan says that Sudan's Islamic government is using the Janjaweed to carry out a genocidal campaign against non-Arabs, killing who it can and driving out the rest.

 

CMDR HASSAN: [subtitles] The government is trying to remove all Africans from power and replace them with Janjaweed, so that the Janjaweed will represent the Arabs in Darfur.

 

AMY COSTELLO: The Janjaweed and the Sudanese government are accused of working together to fuel the conflict in Darfur.

 

At this market, some of the Janjaweed come to trade their camels. It's been reported that the government signed up some 20,000 men in places like this, offering them a gun, monthly salary and the freedom to loot, rape and seize land held by non-Arabs. Some Janjaweed wear white robes, but others now wear unmarked government uniforms. It's no longer clear who the Janjaweed are.

 

[www.pbs.org: Background on the Janjaweed]

 

I went looking for answers from a man who is known as the Janjaweed's local lawyer, Omer al Amin.

 

[on camera] Do you think that the government can control them? Do you think if the government says to the Janjaweed, "Stop your campaign here in Darfur" that they can? Or do you think that the Janjaweed is separate and they are continuing to do what they want and the government can't control them?

 

OMER AL AMIN.: [subtitles] There is no such thing as the Janjaweed. It's a figment of the imagination. It's true, there used to be bandits, but no more.

 

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] Amin said the people I called Janjaweed were really a special division of the military.

 

OMER AL AMIN.: [subtitles] Border Intelligence Division.

 

AMY COSTELLO: He said the government enlisted Arab tribesmen to fight the rebels in a legitimate military campaign.

 

OMER AL AMIN.: [subtitles] Now they have a camp in Mistariha and train there as soldiers. They get their orders from El Fasher. That's how they operate.

 

AMY COSTELLO: The next day, we set out for the "Border Intelligence Division" in Mistariha, a base the AU calls the headquarters of the Janjaweed. We were told not to film, but we kept the cameras running. The AU told us that the two men on the left are Janjaweed leaders. They call themselves the "7th Brigade." They shared the couch with a representative from the Sudanese government.

 

[on camera] What is the 7th Brigade responsible for?

 

JANJAWEED SOLDIER: [subtitles] All of the problems concerning the security situation of the area.

 

AMY COSTELLO: Who does the 7th Brigade answer to? Who gives the commands to the 7th Brigade?

 

[voice-over] He said they take orders from the government of Sudan, and abruptly ended the interview.

 

JANJAWEED SOLDIER: [subtitles] You shouldn't ask these questions. They're military questions.

 

AMY COSTELLO: We returned to the African Union base and asked the commander about the men in Mistariha.

 

AU COMMANDER: They have a name that they are very proud of in Arabic. I can't rattle that off, but when translated is, "the quick and the terrible," or "the quick and the horrible," whatever you want to choose. But that is something they are very proud of. They mention it oftentimes, that that is how they are known.

 

They don't mention Intelligence Brigade at all. Intelligence Brigade [unintelligible] for me and you, official force. You know, they give it to us as official. On the ground, maybe that's not what it is. The Janjaweeds are predominantly Arab militia that are logistically and politically supported by the government. They are real, and they have the government backing.

 

AMY COSTELLO: Here in the place where the Blue and the White Nile Rivers meet, lies the ancient capital of Sudan, Khartoum. For the last 15 years, it's been the home of an Islamic government that seized power in a military coup. For almost as long, the country's been a pariah nation, home to Usama bin Laden in the early 1990s, sanctioned by the United Nations for its dismal record on human rights. New oil wealth might save this country. It's made the leadership here want to open up to the world again. But Darfur is a subject they'd rather not discuss.

 

I made a request to speak to the foreign minister, and finally, I was allowed to see him. I asked the foreign minister about the government's support for the Janjaweed.

 

MUSTAFA OSMAN ISMAIL, Foreign Minister: The Janjaweed, these are bandits. They are killers. It could be one or two, whether from the rebels, become an outlaw and join them, whether from the militia, become an outlaw and join them. But they have nothing to do with the government.

 

AMY COSTELLO: The foreign minister explained that the government doesn't back the Janjaweed, but he admitted that they have armed and supported Arab militias willing to fight with them against the Darfur rebels.

 

ISMAIL: Both of us, we are fighting the rebels. So we succeed within one month to clean all the cities being captured by the rebels.

 

AMY COSTELLO: [on camera] And how did you go about doing that, cleaning those cities? How did- how did you go about doing that? What kind of campaign, what kind of military campaign did you use to clean the cities?

 

ISMAIL: It's a military- military operation. And war is war.

 

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] This is how the government of Sudan has come to talk about Darfur, as a counterinsurgency campaign, not as genocide.

 

ISMAIL: It depends that's how your enemy is fighting you.

 

AMY COSTELLO: But the question of genocide won't go away. This past summer, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell toured the Darfur camps. That's the foreign minister on the right. The Khartoum regime tried to put the best face possible on the crisis during the visit. Powell left behind a team of investigators to interview the people in the camps. A few months later, he testified before Congress about what his team learned.

 

COLIN POWELL, Secretary of State: Those interviews indicated, first, a consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities - killings, rapes, burning of villages - committed by Janjaweed and government forces against non-Arab villagers. We concluded - I concluded - that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility, and that genocide may still be occurring.

 

ISMAIL: For me, I'm not sure whether Colin Powell is convinced of what he has said. I personally believe that he was not convinced because he was here, and we had a long discussion with him. We visited Darfur together. But the man was caught in an election and that the Democrats, they are putting pressure on the Republican campaign by saying that this is a genocide.

 

AMY COSTELLO: The foreign minister quoted the United Nations convention that defines genocide as a deliberate attempt by one party to eliminate another. He said the term just doesn't apply to Darfur.

 

ISMAIL: In Rwanda, there are about 800,000 Tutsi been killed by Hutu. But here, who is trying to eliminate another? The government is fighting the rebels. Any legitimate government, when there is rebel fighting and they start to control city after city, and they raise their flag for an independent state- any responsible government will respond.

 

AMY COSTELLO: This current regime in Khartoum has a long and bitter history of suppressing opposition. Just 20 minutes drive out of the city, I found a camp. It looked remarkably similar to the camps I'd seen in Darfur, but these were Christian refugees from the south, where some two million people had been killed during Sudan's 21-year-old civil war. The tactics were a mirror image of Darfur- bombing civilians, arming Arab militias and driving people off their land. Many have been waiting to go home for more than a decade.

 

This is the history that many say you need to know to understand the crisis in Darfur. It's what's on the mind of a dissident lawyer in Khartoum who I went to look for one afternoon. Ghazi Suleiman says rebels in Darfur want major changes in Khartoum.

 

GHAZI SULEIMAN: The conflict of Darfur is a political conflict, it is not a tribal conflict. It is, in fact, a struggle for power in Khartoum here in the center, irrespective of the fact that the battlefield, it is in Darfur. You see? You see? It is a political question. And the problems in Darfur will continue until we are able to achieve a democratic secular state. If the center will continue totalitarian, repressive, the problem of Darfur will continue.

 

AMY COSTELLO: [on camera] Where are we going right now?

 

GHAZI SULEIMAN: Now we are going to Khartoum University.

 

AMY COSTELLO: [voice-over] Ghazi Suleiman says Khartoum's Islamist regime must finally give in to the democratic aspirations of the Sudanese people. He took us to a protest for Darfur at Khartoum University, a rare public expression of frustration with the government.

 

[on camera] I was a little surprised to see such a public demonstration going on on this campus. Is the campus quite free?

 

TRANSLATOR: They say there is democracy within the university campus, so-

 

[subtitles] What about outside the university?

 

STUDENTS: [subtitles] No, no, No. Outside, we'd go to jail.

 

TRANSLATOR: It's only within this campus, but not outside.

 

AMY COSTELLO: Democracy is not likely in Sudan any time soon.

 

After years of international pressure, the Khartoum government has just signed a peace deal with the south, but it's not clear whether any meaningful change will result. And with the Darfur crisis worsening by the day, a former Sudanese diplomat warns that the largest country in Africa could still fall apart.

 

GHAZI ATABANI, Former Sudanese Diplomat: The possibility of Sudan disintegrating is there, is always there. If the United States is keen not to have another hotbed for terrorism, they have to realize that if the center of authority in Sudan collapses, that means the Somalization of Sudan. And Sudan is much bigger, much more diversified than Somalia.

 

AMY COSTELLO: In Darfur, the food aid keeps rolling in and the international spotlight remains trained on the crisis, but the Khartoum government seems to continue its campaign unchecked.

 

Just before we left Darfur, local police came to this camp in the middle of the night with bulldozers and guns to forcibly move the people here to a different camp. We arrived the next morning.

 

1st MAN: [subtitles] The government shot at us!

 

2nd MAN: [subtitles] Police! Police! Police came here.

 

AMY COSTELLO: I was told that the African Union troops stood by during the attack. They're still not authorized to protect civilians.

 

The United Nations team has been on the ground here, investigating the charge of genocide. Soon they'll make a final pronouncement. But walking through the ruined landscape of al-Jeer, it's hard to imagine whether any words, even one as powerful as genocide, could fix such a broken place.

 

 

ANNOUNCER: Finally tonight, the heavy hand of the Chinese government.

 

China: Silenced

Reporter: Serene Fang

 

SERENE FANG, Reporter: [voice-over] There's a province in western China where people are afraid to speak. It's called Xinjiang. Coming here would change my life.

 

[on camera] Xinjiang is mostly desert, with a number of high mountain ranges that surround it. The Chinese, for many years, it's been sort of like their Siberia. It's where they sent people- where they built a lot of their penal colonies.

[voice-over] Xinjiang is the homeland of eight million Sufi Muslims. They are known as the Uighurs, and they call this place East Turkistan. Independent reporting is forbidden here, so I came as a tourist, under cover, to see what life is like for Muslims in China.

[on camera] They speak a different language. They look very different from the Han Chinese. And most of them live in the far northwest of China, in the Xinjiang province. They practice Islam, but it's a more relaxed form. The men typically- they drink. The women do not cover up very much. But now the borders are open with Pakistan, to some degree, the Chinese do fear ideas will percolate in and that they may join this global movement toward militant Islam.

 

[www.pbs.org: Learn more about the Uighurs]

The people tend to be fairly segregated. In each town, there's a Uighur section and there's a Chinese section, and the Chinese section tends to be more modern, a lot of new, bigger buildings, skyscrapers, and the office buildings. And the Uighurs tend to be more agricultural. There's, you know, stalls where they sell food in smaller markets. They tend to be very poor.

[voice-over] There was one interview we had set up in advance. He was a Uighur man who had agreed to meet us.

 

[on camera] He was very articulate, and at the same time, he was terrified to come- just to come to our hotel to see us. He was terrified. He sat in our hotel room, trembling, for, you know, close to an hour and refused to be videotaped. I felt that in order to tell this story, someone like that had to be shown.

[voice-over] When I returned to the United States, I found a Uighur exile willing to speak out.

ALIM SEYTOFF, Uyghur American Association: My father was one of the victims of the Chinese regime. He was a pro-independence person. He had this deep belief that Uighur people deserved an independent state. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

SERENE FANG: Today, Alim and his brother live in the United States, under political asylum.

SEYTOFF: China conquered us, occupied us and treat us like slaves, dogs, whatever, not as human beings, just force us to live according to Chinese culture and Chinese standard. And we will not accept that. I don't think we have ever accepted that. And that's why, as feeble as we are, we're still struggling against Chinese rule. Yes.

SERNE FANG: [on camera] When I was back in the United States, I received an email from the Uighur man who had been too frightened to talk to us earlier. He said he had decided to talk. At the end of October, I flew back to China and went to the capital in Urumqi and met him.

He was still very frightened. He said that if the government knew that he had come to talk with me, he would be punished very severely. He talked a bit about the fact that Uighurs just can't express themselves. He didn't talk about separatism, he simply said they wanted to be able to speak freely. He brought with him a list of about 20 names and ages of Uighurs he said that he read in the newspaper had been either imprisoned or executed.

We finished the interview at sunset. As soon as we got out the front door, we walked down the driveway a little bit. I turned to say something to him, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye these two men, dressed in plain dark clothing, walking toward us. They walked towards us, they grabbed his arm, they grabbed my arm, showed us identification, and told us they were the police and we needed to go back upstairs to his room with them.

They had him take off his jacket, empty out his pockets. And they told him to stand against the wall. He was so frightened he fell to his knees, and he passed out. They took him into another room. And when they brought him back, he was crying. And the rest of the time that I was with him, he was just crying, crying with his head in his hands.

They asked me why did I want to talk to terrorists- again and again, just conflating the words terrorist, Uighur, separatist. In their minds, it was all one thing. I only had one tape, and they took it. I'm assuming it's now evidence against him. Experts in China, human rights advocates, have said, "If he gets three to five years in prison, you should just be happy for him and just not say anything."

 

[voice-over] But since that night, I haven't been able to obtain any information about him. That's why I decided to reveal his identity, to bring attention to his situation. His name is Dilkex Tilivaldi. He worked for the city of Ghulja. He was taken away on the night of October 19th by the Ministry of State Security.

[on camera] I subscribe to those journalistic ethics that say that the story is important. It's important to get the truth out there. But you know, the price was very high, and I didn't have to pay it. [weeping] So yeah, I- if I could take it back, I would! I think about his wife and his children. You know, what are they going to do? So yeah, I regret it.

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ANNOUNCER: There's more of the world to explore on our Web site. Watch a full-length version of our China story, Silenced, examine the different factions involved in the Sudan crisis, and find out what it's like to report from some of the most dangerous places in the world. Discuss the world and tell us what you think of our Stories From a Small Planet at pbs.org.

 

Next time on FRONTLINE-

 

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: We have the terrorists on the run!

 

ANNOUNCER: Since 9/11, there have been no al Qaeda attacks in the United States. But in Madrid, Berlin and London, there is a growing threat.

 

RALLY SPEAKER: We must prepare to die now!

 

EXPERT: Al Qaeda today is larger than anyone believed them to be.

 

EXPERT: Europe has become a battlefield.

 

ANNOUNCER: Is Europe Al Qaeda's New Front? Next time on FRONTLINE.

 

 

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