The United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, confirmed that rape as a weapon of war is widespread in Sudan. Millions are being pushed to the brink of famine. The hostilities have resulted in looting and widespread destruction of infrastructure.
“I am not married and I was a virgin”, said Amina, a 19-year-old Sudanese when she arrived at a temporary clinic run by the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres. She was talking last week to the BBC’s Arabic special correspondent, Feras Kilani, a 47-year-old Palestinian-British journalist who has just returned from Sudan, where from the front-line he obtained an exceptional insight into life in the country during its civil war. In a rare interview published by the BBC, Amina, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, described in harrowing detail how she and her aunt and cousins were captured by militiamen as they were fleeing from their hometown of Ardamatta in Darfur, close to Sudan’s border with Chad. “The others escaped, but they kept me for a whole day. There were two of them, and one of them raped me many times before I managed to escape”, she wept. Amina found out that she was pregnant as a result of the rape and had arrived at the charity seeking an abortion, desperately hoping that her family will never find out. Sexual violation is a taboo subject in Sudan and victims can face a lifetime of stigma and marginalisation from their own families and communities. Many people in the region do not want to discuss the issue.
The United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, confirmed that rape as a weapon of war is widespread in Sudan. “Sexual violence and rape have been a defining and despicable characteristic of this crisis since the beginning”, he told the UNHCR Council in Geneva earlier this month. Since last April his team has documented 60 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence, involving at least 120 victims across Sudan, “the vast majority are young women and girls”, he added, “but these figures are sadly a vast underrepresentation of the reality”. The paramilitary group, Rapid Support Forces (RSF), were reported to be responsible for more than 80 percent of the documented incidents, said Turk. According to a report by the UN, in Geneina, a city in west Darfur close to Ardamatta, women and girls as young as 14 were raped by elements of the RSF in a World Food Programme storage facility that the paramilitary force controlled.
It’s now nearly a year since the start of the conflict that pitted army units loyal to Sudan’s military ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy head of the ruling council. Both believe they can seize unchallenged control of Sudan’s resources and its crumbling, but still powerful, state. Neither is prepared to compromise. Sudan sits astride major routes for human trafficking and narcotics, and contains many valuable minerals. The vicious power struggle has killed at least 14,000 people across the country in the past year; possibly more. The RSF has taken control of areas to the south of the capital, Khartoum, as well as swathes of Darfur, which has been in turmoil for years with violence between its various African and Arab communities. The RSF’s expanding domination in Darfur, supported by allied Arab militias, has brought with it a surge in ethnically driven attacks on the black African population.
Sudan, in particular its western region of Darfur, is no stranger to violence and war. Twenty years ago, an Arab militia called the Janjaweed, in which the RSF has its roots, was mobilised by former President Omar al-Bashir to crush a rebellion by non-Arab groups. According to the United Nations, some 300,000 people were killed and rape was used as a way to terrorise black African communities and force them to flee. Fast forward to today and it’s clear that things haven’t changed. In a rare insight into RSF attitudes driving violence towards women, an RSF field commander posted a video on social media last November, since deleted. In it he chillingly said: “if we rape your daughter or your girl, it’s an eye for and eye. This is our country and this is our right and we took it”.
This was certainly what Maryamu (not her real name) from Sudan’s black African community experienced in November last year. Her tears flowed freely as she told Feras Kilani that she was raped by armed men wearing the turban-style headdresses typical of Arab fighters in the area. “I had difficulty walking afterwards”, she sobbed. “People were running, but we couldn’t because my grandmother can’t run. I was also bleeding”.
But Sudan faces an even greater problem. Millions are being pushed to the brink of famine. The hostilities have resulted in looting and widespread destruction of infrastructure.
Farmers have been forced to abandon their farmlands, resulting in a food scarcity with the small amount available priced well beyond the means of ordinary people. “Sudan is one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent years”, claimed Edem Wasomu, a senior official from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “and is on course to become the world’s worst hunger crisis, with some 220,000 children dying of hunger in the coming weeks and months”. Echoing that warning, Carl Skau, Deputy Executive Director of the UN World Food programme, said that across the region, nearly 28 million people face starvation, with 18 million in Sudan, 7 million in South Sudan and nearly 3 million in neighbouring Chad. The emergency relief programme is severely hampered by lack of access and resources; most in urgent need are trapped in areas that are largely inaccessible to humanitarian agencies. “We are running out of time”, he stressed.
The situation is perhaps worst in Darfur, the vast western region that serves as the RSF’s power base. Medecins Sans Frontieres has estimated that in Zamzam, a camp for Sudanese displaced by years of fighting, dozens of children are dying of hunger every day. “What we are seeing in Zamzam camp is an absolutely catastrophic situation”, said Claire Nicolet, head of MSF’s emergency response in Sudan. “Those with severe malnutrition who have not yet died are at high risk of dying within three to six weeks if they don’t get treatment”.
Amid claim and counterclaim by the two sides as to whom is responsible for the humanitarian crisis, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appealed two weeks ago for a cease fire for the holy month of Ramadan so that emergency aid could be delivered. His appeal was ignored. Last week he formally alerted the Security Council that Sudan had entered a downward spiral of extreme conflict-induced hunger, and that “the nearly year-long conflict not only threatened the country’s unity but could ignite regional instability of dramatic proportions”.
But with the world’s attention focused on Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan receives woefully little high-level international attention. As the fighting continues to rage, Sudan has not so much slid down the international agenda as off it entirely. With ongoing mass rape, famine and deaths unleashing ethnic cleansing, Sudan has become the world’s forgotten disaster zone.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.