ARTALA, Sudan — Omar Abdul Aziz Gader cupped his hand over his eyes and scanned a landscape of scorched fields and mud huts reduced to rings of ash.
Where others might have seen a wasteland, Mr. Gader saw home.
“It’s good to be back,” he said.
As a displaced person from Darfur , Mr. Gader found his options were not great. He could have stayed in the packed, increasingly unruly camp where he had been living for the past two years, or he could have ventured back to Artala, his native village, which was burned to the ground by nomadic raiders.
He decided to go home in September after learning that his corner of southwestern Darfur was actually rather peaceful, a place where nomads and farmers had begun to take halting steps toward reconciliation.
Much of Darfur, a vast swath of territory in western Sudan, is still a battlefield, with vicious fighting between the Sudanese government and rebel forces, and masses of people fleeing their villages each day.
But there are other parts, lesser known, where people are heading the other way, going home.
It is a journey that is also difficult, with homecomings that may prove to be short-lived. But aid workers estimate that there are several thousand returnees like Mr. Gader — and many more on their way.
Mr. Gader says he is looking ahead, building a new hut and planting onions, though at times the past seizes him.
“When I look at my old house,” he said, “I don’t feel fear. I feel shame.”
A vast majority of those who are returning are farmers, the primary victims of the bloodshed in Darfur. In this part of the world, lifestyle and ethnicity are closely connected, with most farmers belonging to non-Arab tribes, while most nomads consider themselves full-blooded Arabs.
The conflict has pitted these two groups against each other, though it wasn’t always like that.
Not so long ago, in the village of Wastani, near Artala, nomadic women and women from farms would meet in the fields halfway between their homes and share little glasses of tea.
The nomads, who herded camels and cows, would bring meat, and the farmers would bring grain, and they would trade with one another in a fragile tapestry of interdependence between two peoples surviving off the same slice of dry, unforgiving land.
“Sometimes I would sit for two days with them and steal jokes,” said Hawa Abdullah, a villager.
But then war came. Nomadic gunmen on horses — some of whom the farmers recognized, some they did not — raided Wastani in 2003, burning huts and shooting people in the chest. It was a nightmare that recurred countless times across Darfur, an area the size of France.
But now, for the first time since then, Wastani’s farmers are moving back, and the nomads are trying to make amends.
Ms. Abdullah said that shortly after she returned, an old Arab friend came to her house with a bundle of food in her arms and tears in her eyes.
“She said she was sorry, and was crying even more than I was,” Ms. Abdullah said.
It is easy to oversimplify Darfur. The broad outlines of the conflict are that non-Arab tribes felt excluded from Sudan’s Arab-led central government, and formed rebel groups to attack government forces. The government responded by arming Arab militias, who did not confront the rebels directly, but instead brutalized civilians who belonged to the same tribal groups as the rebels.
The conflict had been simmering for years, but major fighting erupted in 2003. Since then more than 200,000 people have been killed, and 2.5 million have fled their homes to seek shelter in camps. Despite a peace treaty signed this spring with one of the rebel groups, the killing continues, especially in northern Darfur, and many diplomats and aid experts have forecast a humanitarian disaster.
The American government and European allies have tried to press Sudan to allow United Nations peacekeepers to replace the relatively small force of African Union peacekeepers here, but the Sudanese government has refused, saying the situation in Darfur was not as dire as it has often been portrayed.
Some aspects of life appear to be getting better. A United Nations study released in October found that malnutrition and child mortality had decreased since 2004, and that people who were farming were better off than those squeezed into camps without any land.
Camp dwellers are watching all this cautiously. They have schools, water towers and medical clinics — the very things missing from Darfur’s villages, and which planted the seeds of resentment in the first place. But many camps have morphed into giant villages, with thousands of huts packed together in long rows like streets.
Suleiman Ibrahim, an elder in Mukjar, a camp near Artala with 10,000 displaced people, said that he had heard about people returning home, some just 30 miles away, but that he still worried about armed bandits. “It’s not safe out there,” he said.
But many camps are not so safe either, with unchecked violence and rising tension between supporters of different rebel factions.
Mr. Gader, 32, spoke in hushed tones of camp politics and how some of the displaced people had called him a traitor for even thinking of going home, because they said it bolstered the government’s claim that things were not so bad. Mr. Gader, who lived in a huge camp in southern Darfur called Kalma, with an estimated population of 100,000, said he, his wife and his two children had to leave in the middle of the night.
“We basically escaped,” he said.
Aid workers and camp dwellers say camp elders have a vested financial interest in keeping as many people as possible in the camp, because the elders can make money by siphoning food aid and selling it in local markets. But the returnees are learning that home is a complicated place, too.
Artala, like Wastani, is a mixed community of farmers and nomads, and there is an unspoken rule not to talk about the conflict.
“What’s the point?” said one of the elders, a man named Adam Adam.
Wastani used to have a vibrant market every Sunday, when thousands of farmers flocked in from the fields, and nomads rode in from miles around to trade crops, livestock, tea, sugar, gossip and sometimes even the hands of their daughters.
During the years of conflict, the market emptied. James Wole, a team leader for CARE International, the large aid organization that was one of the first to go into Darfur, said the nomads eventually realized that they were hurting their own businesses, which is one reason they were eager for their old farming friends to come home.
“The truth is these people are very interdependent, in many practical ways,” Mr. Wole said. Mohammed Ibrahim Dibba, the commander of an African Union peacekeeping base in Mukjar, said: “I hear these reports on the radio about genocide, but I don’t see that coming, at least not here. The people are coming together — gradually.”
Security remains a touchy issue. Farmers here said nobody had been killed in months, but many grumbled that the same bandits who raided their villages are now the policemen in town. Several farmers identified Adam Medani Hamad, a nomad who roams the area around Wastani with his two wives and dozens of cattle, as a janjaweed, a bandit. He denied that, and said he was a member of the local defense force. He even has a laminated yellow card to prove it.
“We didn’t just welcome the farmers home, we brought them home,” Mr. Hamad said, referring to the escorts that nomads provided for some of the returning farmers. In a nearby village, aid workers said a policeman had been killed trying to protect farmers from bandits.
CARE is trying to build on this momentum by helping farmers and nomads form joint committees to oversee agricultural and water issues.
But many farmers are still suspicious. Mr. Gader said his new hut would be made from straw, not mud. “You never know when we might be leaving again,” he said.
And Ms. Abdullah said the food her Arab friend brought her in a fit of tears was very good. But it has been more than six months. And she has not seen the woman again.