Uncovered by a restless wind, skulls and bones poke above the thin dirt in this corner of Darfur, lying surrounded by half-buried, rotting clothes.
A short, bearded man named Ibrahim, 42, scratched through the sand. He was a quiet and serious, close to tears. There are other, bigger grave sites elsewhere, he said, but the bones he was looking at were those of 25 people who he is sure were his friends and fellow villagers.
Some of them were dragged from the prison where he was held and were axed to death, he said.
Ibrahim showed the burial ground to a reporter and photographer, the first Western journalists to visit this remote town in more than a year. The western Sudan is about to enter a new phase in its four-year-old conflict -- one that villagers fear may encourage more killing.
Sudan's government recently agreed to let in 3,000 UN peacekeepers, a fraction of the 22,000 mandated by the Security Council last August. The deployment could still take months and villagers here fear the government will want to get rid of all witnesses to atrocities before peacekeepers move in.
"We need them to come as fast as possible, because we're all in danger," Ibrahim said.
Aid workers and UN personnel say the burial site is just one of three dozen mass graves around Mukjar, a town at ground zero of the Darfur calamity, holding evidence at the heart of the international community's case against Sudanese leaders for war atrocities.
Ibrahim and others interviewed insisted their full names be withheld because they fear reprisals. It is difficult to independently verify their accounts, but they cited dates and victims' names and drew maps of grave sites. Ibrahim named nine of the people buried in the grave he showed to the reporter.
Some of what the witnesses say matches up with what a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, has documented: at least 51 cases of alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Mukjar area -- mass executions, torture and rapes of civilians.
killings
The prosecutor says most of the killings were done by the Sudanese army and the janjaweed, Arab militiamen backed by the Sudanese government. Their war on Darfur rebels, which turned against all black African villagers, has become the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with more than 200,000 dead and 2.5 million made homeless.
This month, the court issued arrest warrants for two men -- a Sudanese government minister and an alleged janjaweed commander -- who it contends directed atrocities here.
Most of the mass killings in this area happened in late 2003 and early 2004, when long-simmering tensions in Darfur flared into its latest bloodbath.
Ali Kushayb, the alleged janjaweed commander named by the ICC, has been fired as the Mukjar region chief of the "central reserve" police, a force regarded as a cover for the janjaweed. But he was replaced by his deputy, Addaif al-Sinah, who villagers say remains the area's janjaweed chief.
Ahmed Harun, who was a government minister and head of the government's Darfur task force when the killings occurred, is also sought by the court. He is now the minister of humanitarian affairs.
Mukjar offers a sobering look at the results of a government victory: Impoverished and frightened ethnic Africans huddle in refugee camps where they survive on humanitarian aid, while Arab nomads control the hinterland, threatening any farmer who tries to return.
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