Fatima Abdelrahman spoke in Arabic in her Cairo living room while her husband slept on a bed in the corner. Her mother rested in the next room. Four of her children played with the neighbor’s goat in the small, trash-covered courtyard outside the four-flat building.

 Fatima is a thirty-nine-year-old mother of six, originally from the western Sudan region of Darfur. Throughout most of her life, her country’s ongoing civil war between the government and the south-Sudan-based SPLA had been a distant abstraction. She lived a peaceful life raising her family in the town of Marla in Darfur.

In 2003, however, war came to Darfur. Janjaweed—government-hired mercenaries—came on horseback, killing and raping Fatima’s neighbors and family members. Fatima fled with her mother and children, eventually making their way to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, where Fatima found work as a housekeeper for Jan Pronk, head of the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). When a group of men, representing the government of Sudan, kidnapped and threatened to kill Fatima if she did not help them spy on Pronk, Pronk helped her escape with her family to Cairo.

Fatima found no solace in Cairo. She was robbed of her refugee paperwork, including a letter given to her by Pronk. In 2005, her family was beaten in the aftermath of protests outside the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. She yearned to return to her home in Darfur.

Millions of people have fled from conflicts and persecution in all parts of Sudan, and many thousands more have been enslaved as human spoils of war. In Out of Exile, refugees and abductees recount their escapes from the wars in Darfur and South Sudan, from political and religious persecution, and from abduction by militias. In their own words, they recount life before their displacement and the reasons for their flight. They describe life in the major stations on the “refugee railroads”: in the desert camps of Khartoum, the underground communities of Cairo, the humanitarian metropolis of Kakuma refugee camp, and the still-growing internally displaced persons camps in Darfur.

Out of Exile is the fourth book in the Voice of Witness series. Using oral history as its foundation, the Voice of Witness series seeks to illuminate contemporary human rights crises by giving a voice to those who experience them.

—Craig Walzer

I. EVERYTHING WAS POSSIBLE

FATIMA; I was born in Nyala, the capital of south Darfur, in 1969. My family is of the Fur tribe. I grew up in a good life, and my people were happy in that world with our traditions and customs. We are known to be generous people, and we are good people.

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