War against women: many thousands of women have been raped in Darfur—yet they are the ones who end up being punished. Femke van Zeijl listens to their stories

New Internationalist, June, 2007 by Femke van Zeijl

Nura sits quietly in her family's recently built hut. She leans against the bamboo fence and stays silent. Newly arrived in Duma, a small town in the middle of the barren plains of South Darfur, the 15-year-old girl has refused to come out for two days now.

Her older brother does the talking: 'The day before yesterday we returned to our village together.' He points at the horizon in the direction of the mountains. 'When we had to flee last week, we didn't have time to dig up the money box buried in the yard. So we went back for it.'

On the journey they encountered the feared men with machine guns. The Arabs on horseback--he daren't utter the word Janjaweed--forced the two to an abandoned village nearby, where they battered him with their gun barrels. His sister was next. 'They dragged her to another house. I could not see what happened, but I heard her screaming and couldn't do anything. The whole way back, Nura cried.'

The father of the siblings arrives at the hut, and tells the story to me once more. He is especially keen that the correct amount of money that was stolen from him gets put down on paper. He painstakingly dictates the exact number of Sudanese dinars and adds that he was also robbed of a strong mule. He doesn't say a single word about the fact his 15-year-old daughter was raped by four men.

Sexual violence against women is occurring on a massive scale in Darfur. Amnesty International calls these mass rapes a weapon of war. After years of pressure from women's organizations around the world, a 1998 landmark United Nations decision confirmed the concept of rape as a war crime, one that has increased during recent years. Darfur fits the pattern of Cambodia, Liberia, Peru, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda, with violence against women being systematically used by warring parties.

Destroying the future

Mariam is a midwife at a hospital in South Darfur. She's been in the profession for decades, but when I met her, she told me the last few years have been incredible.

A girl she had seen that very morning had been raped by five Arabs. The sixth cut her vagina with a knife. She was in hospital for months and now is going back to her family--in a refugee camp. 'She is afraid of what her parents might say. I am going with her for a conversation with her family. Step by step we tell them what has happened, that it wasn't her fault. I try to prevent her repudiation,' the midwife explains.

Rape is an enormous taboo in Sudan. Survivors mostly keep the experience to themselves, though they frequently say they 'know somebody who has been abused'; only after long talks might a survivor admit that she herself was the victim.

Women impregnated from rape are in even worse circumstances. According to a popular myth, you cannot get pregnant from rape. So there have been cases where pregnant rape survivors have been imprisoned for 'adultery'. Mariam says: 'A lot of abused girls do not want a baby from the enemy and ask for a pill to make it go away.' But she cannot help; abortion is legal only to save the life of the woman. 'I tell the girl it won't matter any more whether her baby is Arab once the war is over. I go with her to her family to talk about this.'

In Darfur, the Arab militia and military make a point of abusing women in front of their families or entire village. Raping a woman is such an effective weapon because it affects an entire community, for decades. French anthropologist Veronique Nahoum-Grappe calls it 'destroying the future'. Children who witness the crime are traumatized, men flee from their partners out of shame, and women become 'damaged goods', sometimes literally, if they can no longer have children because of the violence. Through raping wives and daughters, Nahoum-Grappe explains, the attackers actually target the 'real enemy': the men behind them. Having to have your enemy's baby goes one step further and turns this sexual violence into a tool for 'ethnic cleansing'.

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Struggle to survive

Meanwhile, the rape victims in Darfur struggle to survive. A report by the Dutch branch of Medecins Sans Frontieres, issued two years ago, noted that their organization alone had treated almost 500 rapes in a four-and-a-half-month period. Because comprehensive research is made impossible by the lack of humanitarian access to much of Darfur, it is hard to state exact numbers. But it is safe to say that there are many thousands of women who have been raped.

Hawa, 18 years old, is one of them. She now lives alone in a tiny cabin. In the midst of a teeming Darfur refugee camp where most families must share huts, this seems a luxury. But for Hawa it's terrible, especially at night, when gunshots sound throughout the camp. 'I hide under my bed till it's over,' Hawa tells me. 'Those moments remind me of that last night in my village.'

One Friday night, gunshots woke her. She saw other villagers running from attackers: men with Kalashnikov rifles riding horses and camels. 'Janjaweed. I started running, but ...' Two men caught her and another girl. 'They tied our hands together and raped us.'