APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 98 98 AFRICA PEACE AND CONFLICT JOURNAL assemble in secure, accessible places where humanitarian workers could aid them.35 In addition, the deteriorating security situation in most parts of Darfur prevented NGOs and UN relief food distribution efforts from reaching pastoralists. The pastoralists being confined to pockets in rural Darfur and dispersed in small mobile groups made relief food delivery difficult if not impossible in some cases. Thus, pastoralists have not received humanitarian food assistance, and their severe food insecurity persists. The loss of services that peasant villages once provided is another consequence of the conflict that pastoralists endure. During their migrations, they could access village clinics, health centers, and dispensaries for critical health care needs and services. Midwives were readily available for women in labor. These services disappeared along with the displaced settlers.36 As a consequence, laboring pastoralist women and the sick must be taken hurriedly by camel over long distances to a midwife or a medical center, raising the risk of great suffering.37 A GRASS-ROOT RECONNECTION The suffering the peasant settlers and pastoralists have endured has contributed to a tendency among them toward rapprochement. Fatigue from the violence and insecurity that disrupted normal life for so long is widespread among both groups, who yearn for the restoration of the normal, generally peaceful lives they had led before the grand conflict. Darfuri men and women, including leaders, articulate this feeling through their use of the Arabic expressions kama fi sabig and zay ma kan zaman (‘as was in the past’). The desire to heal wounds and reconcile is evident in various efforts, interactions, and gestures of good will, particularly by Arab pastoralists. One sign of this fatigue and desire for peace was Arab sheikhs’ refusal to respond positively to a government plan to wage a campaign against the armed movements in 2005.38 Local officials had called for a gathering of pastoralist tribes near Zalengie, close to Jebel Merra, and urged them to attack the movements nearby.39 The Arabs rejected the government’s request, asserting that it was the government’s war, not theirs. The Arab tribes’ response represents an expression of their increasing realization that the grand conflict, into which some of their tribesmen have been dragged, has damaged their own interests. Yet another example of Arab attitudes towards their African compatriots is that of Nawaiba camel pastoralists preventing Hotiyya (Arab) cattle herders from cultivating 35. Without in-depth understanding of the complexity of the Darfur grand conflict and the problems involved, these factors have been exacerbated by the reality that the pastoralists are treated in accordance with the simplistic conception that all pastoralists are aggressors, and thus do not deserve assistance. Few organizations care about the way they have been affected by the conflict. 36. The health service facilities that these groups shared were staffed by personnel drawn from the settled community. Medical personnel and midwives were also displaced and moved into camps with their communities. 37. Interview, Abdel Gadir Adam; interview, Shartai Yagoub. 38. Interview, Shartai Yagoub; interview, Mohamed Ahmed, community leader and conflict resolution mediator, El Fashir, August 2006. 39. Three calves were slaughtered for a feast held during the gathering.