CNN’s Clarissa Ward Details Experience Being Held Captive By A Militia In North Darfur

CNN‘s chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her crew were held captive earlier this month by a militia in North Darfur, detained for about 48 hours before they were freed.

In an account of the experience on CNN.com, Ward wrote that she, cameraman Scott McWhinnie and producer Brent Swails were attempting to gain access to Tawila, a town under the control of SLM-AW, a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement. That is a neutral party in the civil war in Sudan. There, they hoped to interview refugees fleeing the violence in what has become a humanitarian crisis.

But they were detained by a militia led by a man who was referred to as the “general,” who apparently suspected them of being spies.

They were interrogated, she wrote, and “answered their questions but got no information in return: who these men were or what they wanted with us.”

Ward wrote, “For the next 48 hours, we were held under armed guard by the general, the security chief and roughly a dozen soldiers, some who looked no older than 14. Our detention was spent out in the open, underneath acacia trees. As the only woman, and with no private space to relieve myself, I limited my water and food intake. Sleep, when it came, was a mercy, a reprieve from the clawing sense of panic at not knowing when I would be able to see my children again.”

One member of the militia security chief got phone numbers of their captives’ partners to tell them that they were OK. Ward said that she gave them her husband’s number. She wrote, “Later, we would find out that an English speaker had called my husband and Scott’s wife from the city of Port Sudan, thousands of miles away from where we were held, to say that we were safe and in good health but threatening that we would be imprisoned for many years if they spoke about it to anyone.”

Eventually, the general and the security chief, after disappearing for about six hours, told them that they would be released the next day. Ward and McWhinnie even posed for a photo with the security chief on the edge of the mat where they had been held.

“As a journalist, one never wants to become the story. And yet our experience is instructive in understanding the complexities of the conflict in Darfur and the challenges of getting food and aid to those who need it most and getting the story out to the world,” Ward wrote.