'We Want to Make a Light Baby' Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, June 30, 2004 GENEINA, Sudan, June 29 -- At first light on Sunday, three young women walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur. They had gone out to collect straw for their family's donkeys. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid," meaning "black" and "slave." Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said. "They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, 'Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,' " said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. "They said, 'You get out of this area and leave the child when it's made.' " Suliman's father, a tall, proud man dressed in a flowing white robe, cried as she described the rape. It was not an isolated incident, according to human rights officials and aid workers in this region of western Sudan, where 1.2 million Africans have been driven from their lands by government-backed Arab militias, tribal fighters known as Janjaweed. Interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Janjaweed were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child's ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father. "The pattern is so clear because they are doing it in such a massive way and always saying the same thing," said an international aid worker who is involved in health care. She and other international aid officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals or delays of permits that might hamper their operations. She showed a list of victims from Rokero, a town outside of Jebel Marra in central Darfur where 400 women said they were raped by the Janjaweed. "It's systematic," the aid worker said. "Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture. They want more Arab babies to take the land. The scary thing is that I don't think we realize the extent of how widespread this is yet." Another international aid worker, a high-ranking official, said: "These rapes are built on tribal tensions and orchestrated to create a dynamic where the African tribal groups are destroyed. It's hard to believe that they tell them they want to make Arab babies, but it's true. It's systematic, and these cases are what made me believe that it is part of ethnic cleansing and that they are doing it in a massive way." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell flew to the capital, Khartoum, on Tuesday to pressure the government to take steps to ease the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. U.S. officials said Powell may threaten to seek action by the United Nations if the Sudanese government blocks aid and continues supporting the Janjaweed. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to arrive on Khartoum this week. The crisis in Darfur is a result of long-simmering ethnic tensions between nomadic cattle and camel herders, who view themselves as Arabs, and the more sedentary farmers, who see their ancestry as African. In February 2003, activists from three of Darfur's African tribes started a rebellion against the government, which is dominated by an Arab elite. Riding on horseback and camel, the Janjaweed, many of them teenagers or young adults, burned villages, stole and destroyed grain supplies and animals and raped women, according to refugees and U.N. and human rights investigators. The government used helicopter gunships and aging Russian planes to bomb the area, the U.N. and human rights representatives said. The U.S. government has said it is investigating the killings of an estimated 30,000 people in Darfur and the displacement of the more than 1 million people from their tribal lands to determine whether the violence should be classified as genocide. The New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said in a June 22 report that it investigated "the use of rape by both Janjaweed and Sudanese soldiers against women from the three African ethnic groups targeted in the 'ethnic cleansing' campaign in Darfur." It added, "The rapes are often accompanied by dehumanizing epithets, stressing the ethnic nature of the joint government-Janjaweed campaign. The rapists use the terms 'slaves' and 'black slaves' to refer to the women, who are mostly from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups." Despite a stigma among tribal groups in Sudan against talking about rape, Darfur elders have been allowing and even encouraging their daughters to speak out because of the frequency of the attacks. The women consented to be named in this article. In El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, about 200 miles east of Geneina, Aisha Arzak Mohammad Adam, 22, described a rape by militiamen. "They said, 'Dog, you have sex with me,' " she said. Adam, who was receiving medical treatment at the Abu Shouk camp, said through a female interpreter that she was raped 10 days ago and has been suffering from stomach cramps and bleeding. "They said, 'The government gave me permission to rape you. This is not your land anymore, abid, go.' " Nearby, Ramadan Adam Ali, 18, a frail woman, was being examined at the health clinic. She was pregnant from a rape she said took place four months ago. She is a member of the Fur tribe and has African features. The man said, 'Give me your money, slave,' " she said, starting to cry. "Then I must tell you very frankly, he raped me. He had a gun to my head. He called me dirty abid. He said I was very ugly because my skin is so dark. What will I do now?" In Tawilah, a village southeast of El Fasher, women and children are living in a musty school building. They said it was too dangerous to leave and plant food. Fatima Aisha Mohammad, once a schoolteacher, stood in a dank classroom describing what happened to her three weeks ago, when she left the school to collect firewood. "Very frankly, they selected us ladies and had what they wanted with us, like you would a wife," said Mohammad, 46, who has five children. "I am humiliated. Always they said, 'You are nothing. You are abid. You are too black.' It was disgusting." During a recent visit, government minders warned people at the school to stop talking about the rapes or face beatings or death. Minders also were seen handing out bribes to keep women from speaking to foreign visitors. But those at the school spoke anyway. A group of people handed a journalist two letters in Arabic that listed 40 names of rape victims, and wanted the list to be sent to Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Frank R. Wolf of Virginia, Republicans who were touring the region and pressing the government to disarm the Janjaweed. "I was sad. I am now very angry. Now they are trying to silence us. And they can't," Mohammad said. "What will people think of all of us out here? That we did this to ourselves? People will know the truth about what is happening in Darfur." Later that day in Tawilah's town center, Kalutum Kharm, a midwife, gathered a crowd under a tree to talk about the rapes. Everyone was concerned about the children who would be born as a result. "What will happen? We don't know how to deal with this," Kharm lamented. "We are Muslims. Islam says to love children no matter what. The real problem is we need security. We don't trust the government. We need this raping to stop." Aid workers and refugees in Geneina said that despite an announcement last week by Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, that the Janjaweed would be disarmed, security had not improved. Janjaweed dressed in military uniforms and clutching satellite phones roamed the markets and the fields, guns slung over their shoulders. Last week, the Janjaweed staged a jailbreak and freed 13 people, aid workers said. They also killed a watermelon salesman and his brother because they did not like their prices, family members of the men said. A government official, speaking with a reporter, described the rapes as an inevitable part of war and dismissed accusations by human rights organizations that the attacks were ethnically based. In Geneina, two women told their stories while sitting in front of their makeshift straw shelter. One of the women, a thin 19-year-old with dead eyes, moved forward. "I am feeling so shy but I wanted to tell you, I was raped too that day," whispered Aisha Adam, the tears rushing out of her eyes as she covered her face with her head scarf. "They left me without my clothing by the dry riverbed. I had to walk back naked. They said, 'You slave. This is not your area. I will make an Arab baby who can have this land.' I am hurting now so much, because no one will marry me if they find out." Sitting on mats outside the shelter, Sawela Suliman's father talked with village elders about what to do if his daughter became pregnant. "If the color is like the mother, fine," he said as a crowd gathered to listen. "If it is like the father, then we will have problems. People will think the child is an Arab." Then his daughter looked up. "I will love the child," she said, as other women in the crowd agreed. "But I will always hate the father." Then the rains came. They pounded onto the family's frail shelter, turning their roof into a soggy and dripping clump of straw. Suliman started to shiver as the weather shifted from steaming hot to a breezy rain. She will no longer leave the area of her hut to collect straw. She will stay here, hiding as if in prison, she said, and praying that she is not pregnant.
There is tremendous brutality going on in Africa today. The UN's (and the rest of the world's) complacentcy is shamefull.
Kofi anan refuses to categorize the slaughter as genocide, because the UN would then have to, you know, act... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3853157.stm -- Analysis: Defining genocide Human rights campaigners accuse Sudan's pro-government Arab militia of carrying out genocide against black African residents of the Darfur region. They are accused of forcing some one million people from their homes and killing at least 10,000. Many thousands more are at risk of starving due to a lack of food in the camps where they have fled. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has refused to use the term genocide, which would carry a legal obligation to act. But US Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "We see indicators and elements that would start to move you toward a genocidal conclusion but we're not there yet." But what is genocide and when can it be applied? Some argue that the definition is too narrow and others that the term is devalued by misuse. UN definition The term was coined in 1943 by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who combined the Greek word "genos" (race or tribe) with the Latin word "cide" (to kill). After witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust - in which every member of his family except his brother and himself was killed - Dr Lemkin campaigned to have genocide recognised as a crime under international law. His efforts gave way to the adoption of the UN Convention on Genocide in December 1948, which came into effect in January 1951. Article Two of the convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group The convention also imposes a general duty on states that are signatories to "prevent and to punish" genocide. Ever since its adoption, the UN treaty has come under fire from different sides, mostly by people frustrated with the difficulty of applying it to different cases. 'Too narrow' Some analysts argue that the definition is so narrow that none of the mass killings perpetrated since the treaty's adoption would fall under it. The objections most frequently raised against the treaty include: The convention excludes targeted political and social groups The definition is limited to direct acts against people, and excludes acts against the environment which sustains them or their cultural distinctiveness Proving intention beyond reasonable doubt is extremely difficult UN member states are hesitant to single out other members or intervene, as was the case in Rwanda There is no body of international law to clarify the parameters of the convention (though this is changing as UN war crimes tribunals issue indictments) The difficulty of defining or measuring "in part", and establishing how many deaths equal genocide But in spite of these criticisms, there are many who say genocide is recognisable. In his book Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century, former secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, Alain Destexhe says: "Genocide is distinguishable from all other crimes by the motivation behind it. "Genocide is a crime on a different scale to all other crimes against humanity and implies an intention to completely exterminate the chosen group. "Genocide is therefore both the gravest and greatest of the crimes against humanity." Loss of meaning Mr Destexhe believes the word genocide has fallen victim to "a sort of verbal inflation, in much the same way as happened with the word fascist". Because of that, he says, the term has progressively lost its initial meaning and is becoming "dangerously commonplace". Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, agrees. "Those who should use the word genocide never let it slip their mouths. Those who unfortunately do use it, banalise it into a validation of every kind of victimhood," he said in a lecture about Raphael Lemkin. "Slavery for example, is called genocide when - whatever it was, and it was an infamy - it was a system to exploit, rather than to exterminate the living." In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a renegade commander said he captured the town of Bukavu earlier this month to prevent a genocide of Congolese Tutsis - the Banyamulenge. It later transpired that fewer than 100 people had died. The differences over how genocide should be defined, lead also to disagreement on how many genocides actually occurred during the 20th Century. History of genocide Some say there was only one genocide in the last century - the Holocaust. Other experts give a long list of what they consider cases of genocide, including the Soviet man-made famine of Ukraine (1932-33), the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975), and the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia in the 1970s. Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic is on trial in The Hague, charged with genocide in Bosnia from 1992-5. However, some say there have been at least three genocides under the 1948 UN convention: The mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915-1920 - an accusation that the Turks deny The Holocaust, during which more than six million Jews were killed Rwanda, where an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in the 1994 genocide In the case of Bosnia, many believe that massacres occurred as part of a pattern of genocide, though some doubt that intent can be proved in the case of Mr Milosevic The first case to put into practice the convention on genocide was that of Jean Paul Akayesu, the Hutu mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba at the time of the killings. In a landmark ruling, a special international tribunal convicted him of genocide and crimes against humanity on 2 September 1998. Twenty-one ringleaders of the Rwandan genocide have now been convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Earlier this year, the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia widened the definition of what constitutes genocide. General Radislav Krstic had appealed against his conviction for his role in the killing of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. But the court rejected his argument that the numbers were "too insignificant" to be genocide - a decision likely to set an international legal precedent. On Darfur, Mr Powell says: "We can find the right label for it later, we have got to deal with it now." But US envoy for war crimes Pierre Prosper has already started to compile a list of those associated with the Janjaweed Arab militia. For the moment, these are threatened with sanctions but in the future, they may be charged with genocide, like those in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
This is shameful. The U.S. was quick to act in Iraq claiming the UN wasn't doing enough. Why aren't we acting here? Why isn't the U.S. doing anything? Where is the leadership that should be giving the UN a kick in the rear? The world is standing by while this tragedy is happening.
don't know about the merits of the source, but from the thread-starting article: "U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has raised the alarm about Sudan, but once again the "international community" is proving to be feckless, and the Bush Administration has been isolated in its attempts to raise international pressure on Khartoum."
That's funny DCKid, because the Bushies didn't mind working against all opponents to start Gulf War 2. Guess they don't consider a real humanitarian effort worth their time. We only moved on Haiti because the French were threatening to go in first.
there were US national security interest at stake in the gulf- it's a bit different from a preemption standpoint. granted, i'd like to see us do something, but to say the admon hasn't led on this issue is just wrong. the real culprit has been the laughable UN admin. of kofi anan, and the morally superior EU who've done absolutely nothing. for what does the US exist, if not to address genocide? and please, could we lay off the ritual bush bashing for one thread?
CSMonitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0630/p09s02-coop.htm -- In Sudan's Darfur: action, not just aid By Joseph Siegle WASHINGTON - The Sudanese government's genocidal campaign to expunge African tribes from its western provinces ripples with impunity. More than 1 million people have been uprooted from their homes, 30,000 have been killed, women have been systematically raped, children kidnapped to be used as slaves, farms burned, villages looted, and water sources contaminated with decomposing corpses. The brutality punctuates the unmistakable message: Don't come back. The situation is going to get worse. The approaching rainy season threatens to strand large numbers of the displaced without access to food, medical supplies, and other basic necessities in a barren land soon to be an impassable slop. Aid agencies estimate that 350,000 to 1 million people could die from starvation and disease, conveniently advancing the government's aims while masking culpability - a technique Khartoum has perfected from its decades-long conflict in the south. Besides, time is on the unelected government's side: A prolonged displacement of black Africansprovides the opening for Darfur to be Arabized, as nomadic Arab tribes move into the area. Obviously, there is cause for international action. But let's be clear about the goal: This crisis is entirely politically generated - and demands a political solution. Much effort has focused on getting emergency supplies to refugees in the desolate border area with Chad. While meritorious, this is, in effect, treating the symptom. The objective of international engagement on Darfur should be to get the displaced back home - immediately. An early return provides them with a better chance of survival. It gives them access to their salvageable crops, wild foods, jobs, and repairable water and sanitation systems; traditional social and trading networks can also be recreated. Extended exposure to the overcrowded, unhygienic, and insecure conditions in centers for refugees and displaced persons is a recipe for death and despair - not to mention a Herculean challenge for humanitarian organizations. Moreover, once Arab settlers have moved in, resolution becomes far more difficult. The US and other international actors have called on Sudan to rein in the Arab "Janjaweed" militias responsible and to provide security for the displaced. This is the political equivalent of imploring the fox to guard the henhouse. The Sudanese government has been directly involved in the killings. And it has a long history of sponsoring local militias to destabilize regions of the country and, for that matter, neighboring African countries, with which it is at odds. This "outsourcing" of military operations provides the government a low-cost and plausibly deniable device for advancing its political aims. Counting on the government to ensure the security of a population it wants to exterminate is reminiscent of recent government-sponsored pogroms in Kosovo, Kurdish northern Iraq after the Gulf War, and East Timor. The upshot: by the predatory and abusive violation of its citizens, the dictatorial government of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, like those of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, has relinquished its claims of sovereignty in Darfur. So international efforts should aim at compelling the government to vacate the region, making Darfur a UN protectorate for the moment. A "no-fly zone" should be declared for the region. World leaders have done this in other cases of forced mass displacement - and a less vigorous response in Sudan raises questions of why they turn a blind eye to genocide only in Africa. The Bashir government has one advantage over the likes of Milosevic and Hussein, however. Khartoum knows how to read the writing on the wall: In the face of overwhelming international condemnation, Khartoum has a history of adapting its egregious behavior. It expelled an increasingly notorious Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s, made amends with its neighbors when its complicity in the assassination attempt of Hosni Mubarak in 1995 was publicized, and has positioned itself on the side of the US in the war on terror following the Sept. 11 attacks. The key for the international community, therefore, is to make sure the writing on the wall is clear in the case of Darfur. Secretary of State Colin Powell's planned visit to Darfur Wednesday is a vital opportunity to drive home this point. As with the other instances of the international community rolling back ethnic cleansing, decisive action is required: Action from the US - and, indispensably, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the European Union, and the African Union (AU). Politically, all of these actors must unambiguously and forcefully condemn the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Having violated the terms of membership, Sudan should be prevented from voting in the UN. And its leaders must be held personally accountable. International travel by senior government officials and their families should be barred, their personal assets frozen, and the prospect of war-crimes charges against General Bashir and his ruling clique brandished. The two black African rebel groups against whom the Sudanese government ostensibly launched its campaign must also be compelled to desist completely from any further aggression - which Khartoum has used as a pretext for their mass murder. Economically, pending resolution of war-crimes charges, claims can be made against Sudan's oil exports for compensation to the victims in Darfur - as well as to reimburse the international community for the humanitarian resources expended to ameliorate this manufactured crisis. Simultaneously, sanctions against Sudan's oil exports can be instituted. Shippers caught transporting Sudanese oil would lose their tankers and cargo. The skyrocketing premiums on insurance and freight charges would surely add pressure on Sudan's primary customers - China, Malaysia, and South Korea - to curtail these purchases even if moral suasion alone would not. Security, of course, is the major issue in returning displaced populations. While the AU has 120 peace monitors on the ground, this is inadequate to cover a region the size of France. Closer to 20,000 peacekeepers are required - backed by a UN resolution. Most could come from Africa. However, contributions from other regions would also be needed - ideal candidates being India, Britain, Canada, Australia, and the EU. The US, currently absorbed in Iraq and Afghanistan, should still provide logistical and financial support. "Never again," is the mandate forever etched into our collective consciousness by the Holocaust. Yet, without an established international protocol for responding to genocide, honoring this mandate is never automatic - as we saw in Rwanda. Preventing it this time depends on a quorum of global leaders acting in unison. By so doing, they can prevent this disaster from becoming a catastrophe and forever staining their places in history. • Joseph Siegle is the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is coauthor of the forthcoming book, 'The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace.'
It must have been something like this: if we the Bushies don't generate more terrorists by our stupidity, we won't have this permanent war on terror to run on in 2004.
<a HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22196-2004Jul1.html">Next in Darfur (Editorial)</a> <i> THE GREATEST humanitarian catastrophe since the Rwandan genocide is at last getting the attention it deserves. Over the past two days Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan have paid visits to Darfur, the western Sudanese province where more than 1 million people have been chased out of their homes by government-backed militia forces, and where the death count in unsanitary and undersupplied refugee camps is likely to exceed a third of a million. Mr. Powell and Mr. Annan aimed to impress on Sudan's government that inaction in the face of this suffering will not be tolerated, and the pressure appears to be working. Having deliberately created this crisis, Sudan's rulers now promise to rein in their militia allies; to stop impeding humanitarian access to Darfur; and to open political talks today with Darfur's rebels, whose uprising provoked the monstrous policy of burning villages, turning farmers into refugees and waiting for them to die. The first challenge over the coming weeks will be to hold Sudan to these commitments. Given the space to do so, the government will doubtless revert to its pretense that the plight of Darfur is exaggerated. There is "no famine," the foreign minister declared on Tuesday, notwithstanding reports from aid workers that famine-related deaths are running at about 1,000 per week. Equally, a government that oozes contempt for the lives of its own citizens cannot be trusted to rein in their assailants. When students in Sudan's capital tried to deliver a petition this week to Mr. Annan about the plight of Darfur, security forces opened fire on them. To ensure that Sudan sticks to its commitments, the United States and its allies must push ahead with a U.N. Security Council resolution that threatens members of the Sudanese regime with sanctions if the commitments are not met. The second challenge is to seize the opportunity to get relief supplies into Darfur. Torrential rains are starting to make roads impassable, so this will require a major airlift as well as procurement of relief supplies on a large scale. The United Nations has appealed for $350 million to finance a relief effort, and yesterday a World Health Organization official, newly returned from the region, said it would take a fleet of 20 helicopters to contain outbreaks of cholera and dysentery in the 137 refugee camps spread out across Darfur, an area the size of France. But donor governments have come up with less than half of the money that is needed. <b> According to a U.N. count of firm commitments since March, the United States has promised $62 million, Britain about $11 million. But Germany, France and Japan have each promised less than $4 million. The tightfistedness of these allies is outrageous, as is the reluctance of France and other members of the U.N. Security Council to support a tough resolution on Darfur. To excuse their failure to contribute to Iraq's reconstruction, these nations complain that the Bush administration's Iraq policy was insufficiently deferential to the United Nations. But none other than the U.N. secretary general has just visited Darfur to demonstrate the urgency of humanitarian action. What excuse can there be now?</b> </i>
