Mass rapes destroy thousands of lives
Sudan's culture further victimizes the women and girls who have been raped.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
KALMA CAMP, Sudan -- She has been in the world for 18 days and already her life is tainted. Curled naked under a blanket close to her mother, Nashwa is too young to know shame, the emotion that will be like a shadow to her.
The men in her community in South Darfur province say it would have been better for Fatima Adam, 15, to have died than to have given birth to Nashwa, conceived out of rape, the child of an enemy fighter.
The shame will stain Fatima, her family and the child forever, ruining Fatima's chances of marriage, education and a decent life. Arab militia fighters attacked her village, Tulus, about 10 months ago, killing 26 people and raping 10 girls ranging in age from 14 to 17.
A July report by Amnesty International documented 500 cases of rape in the Darfur region of western Sudan, and added that because of the taboo on discussing rape, that number was probably only a fraction of the total.
A UNICEF report said 41 girls and teachers were gang-raped in the village of Tawila in February while others were abducted as sex slaves. There were reports the women were branded like cattle.
What makes it worse
The trauma of the mass rapes has been deepened by the traditional view that the victims are somehow to blame for what happened and the cultural imperative that a bride be a virgin.
"A girl who's a virgin is like the standard, brand new. It's like a car. With a girl who is raped, it is like she is secondhand," said Mohammed Ibrahim Mohammed, a community leader from Karande village. "If she does marry, it can only be to an old man."
"They can't find a husband, never," said Abdulkarim Adam Eeka, a leader from Tabadiya village. "It's our tradition."
When Fatima Adam ran terrified through the grass during the attack on Tulus last year, two Arab militia fighters chased her down on horseback, leapt to the ground and threw her down to rape her. A third attacker caught up on foot.
"One said, 'This is because you are the Tora Bora,"' Fatima said, the term used by Arab militias to describe the African rebels of Darfur who rose up against the Sudanese government early last year.
"I just heard they were insulting me. They shamed me, but I didn't know the meaning of their words."
What happened
After the rebellion, Arab militias attacked hundreds of villages across Darfur, raping, pillaging, killing, burning structures and forcing more than 1.2 million black Africans of the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa tribes off their land -- assaults described as genocide by the U.S. Congress.
Human-rights groups and Western diplomats say they believe the militia fighters have had support from the Sudanese government, a claim denied by officials in Khartoum, the capital. The United Nations estimates that 30,000 to 50,000 people have died.
And the brutality is far from over. The team leader at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, David Del Conte, said recently that in the last several months, at least 250 women had been raped in the area southwest of Kass, a southern Darfur city.
A typical militia strategy is to set up camps around a village in the weeks before the main attack, not allowing villagers to fetch water or firewood. Men who venture out are killed, so fathers have to make the terrible decision to send the girls and women to the well outside the village, knowing they face rape but not death.
Sudanese authorities are doing little for victims of sexual assault. Hussein Ibrahim Karshun, of the government's Humanitarian Affairs Commission in Darfur, said that it was difficult to prove women were raped and that steps would be taken to set up some kind of mechanism to determine this.
He said police were being trained on how to deal with rape victims and that female police would be recruited.
The Amnesty International report on rape in Darfur said the communities did not seem ready to provide full support to rape victims and their children.
Intellectually, some refugees understand that the women were blameless victims, but they still see a lifetime of shame as inevitable.
"They are brave, I know, but the society can't understand them -- that it happened by accident. It is the uneducated people. They don't understand," said Eeka, the leader from Tabadiya village.