'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; Page A01


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.




====
"Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes"
Maggie Kuhn
http://incurable-hippie.blogspot.com