Black African girls, women tell about rapes by Arabs

Rape is being used as genocide, human-rights activists and aid workers say.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
KAS, Sudan -- Hawa Hussein's eighth child has been growing in her belly for three months, but it's hard for her to love this child.
The baby brings flashbacks. Of four horsemen from an Arab militia called the janjaweed. Of the March evening when they swept into her quiet village, and dragged her down a red dirt path into the wilderness.
Of the gang rape, again and again, for 10 days.
"They tortured me because I was a Fur," said Hawa, 35, referring to her black African tribe, her soft voice falling to a whisper. "This baby doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the janjaweed."
In Africa's war zones, rape is a weapon used to intimidate and control civilian populations. But in the vast, sand-blown province of Darfur, human-rights activists and Western aid workers say, it serves an additional purpose: Genocide.
Despite a cease-fire between black African rebels and the Arab Sudanese government, in village after village, women and girls as young as 12 are being abducted, whipped and raped. Some become sex slaves, while others are impregnated and discarded on roadsides.
There are no laws, no police and no courts to protect the violated. And rape is a source of shame in a Muslim community, where children are valued for carrying forward traditions and bloodlines, ensuring the tribe's survival.
Additional suffering
Those who bare their dark secret risk abandonment by husbands and exile to a lonely life. Most victims suffer in silence, hiding the rapes as best as they can.
"This is an awfully efficient way of erasing someone's identity," said Nils Carstensen, a senior researcher for Danish Church Aid, a relief group, who visited Darfur recently.
For decades, Arab herders have tussled with black African farmers for precious water and land. The tensions have been ratcheted up in recent years by successive Islamic governments that armed Arab tribes and encouraged a policy of "Arabization."
In the most recent 15-month-old conflict, the government's proxy death squads, the janjaweed, have targeted the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit tribes, which have ties to the rebels.
No one knows how many women and girls have been raped or how widespread the campaign is. But in crowded refugee camps and remote aid-worker outposts, horrific stories swirl like dust devils.
They tell of armed men who burst into huts at night to grab women sleeping in the arms of their husbands. They tell of girls robbed of their virginity, then branded with hot irons to forever remind them of their humiliation.
They tell of Mom and Dad being forced to watch.
"Rape often appears to have taken place while victims were restrained, often at gunpoint, and at times in front of family members," said a U.N. human rights report on Darfur that was published last month.
Refuge site
Many of the victims have found their way to Kas, a small town bursting with 40,000 Sudanese who poured in as their villages were set ablaze. Here, they live in a world of collective trauma, of starving girls dying in their mothers' laps, of fathers who watched as their sons were slaughtered.
Inside a primary school, rape victims haunt the dingy corridors. Some tightly clutch their secrets. Others dread the day when their unwanted children enter their new, inhospitable world.
Some women in the camp are in pain all the time. Hawa Juma, 25, outwardly pleasant and younger than she looks, said she felt as if "everything is broken inside" of her. Six men raped her.
In other conflicts, victims are left with AIDS, vaginal fistula -- in which the rape rips apart the vaginal tissue -- and other lifelong health problems.
Khadiyah wouldn't know. She's never seen a doctor or a rape counselor. Few of the hundreds of victims in Kas have. Western aid agencies have yet to fully mobilize, partly because government bureaucracy, bottlenecks and simple inaction have slowed the flow of food, medicine and skilled relief workers to Darfur.