|
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
News Search
|
|
August 9, 2004 Scotsman
LITANY OF RAPE AND ABUSE IN DARFUR REGION Gethin Chamberlain ONE man held her arms, others held her legs. They took it in turns to rape her. It lasted six hours. Afterwards, they sat her naked on a donkey and she rode back to her village as dusk fell. When the baby is born in four months time she will keep it. But a part of her will always think of it as her Janjaweed child. Fatimah Yousef Mohamed is 25 years old. Her head is covered with a pink and black shawl which falls over her body and the orange and blue dress she wears beneath, concealing the swollen belly inside which the child has been growing for the last five months. She toys with the half a dozen silver bangles around her left wrist as she talks, sitting in the shelter of a plastic sheet draped over a frame of branches resting on walls woven from more bits of wood gathered from the countryside around the town of Kass on the border between south and west Darfur. Fatima was married once, and had three children, but they all died. Her husband, unhappy, divorced her. They lived in the village of Kilek, 18 kilometres from Kass. After they split up, Fatima went back to stay with her parents. In February this year, the Janjaweed attacked the village. There was no warning; they rode in and many people were killed. Some fled, others were trapped. The Janjaweed, the Arab militia armed by the Sudanese government, kept them prisoner there for more than a month. There was no escape. Fatima was asleep when the men came for her. "One night I was sleeping with my parents and they came looking for people and they kidnapped me and took me to another village," she said. The Janjaweed were camped in the village; it was about three kilometres away from Kilek. They made her take off her shoes and her dress, everything, until she was naked. "They forced me," she said. "Four people had sex with me. It lasted for six hours. "They held me. They took my arms and legs and threw me on the ground. They held my arms and legs." When it was over, they sat her on the donkey. "I was naked. They had taken my clothes and they did not give them back." When she rode back into the village, her parents asked her what had happened, so she told them. They took her to a local doctor, not a doctor really but someone who knew first aid, and that person said she should go to the hospital. Later, she discovered that she was pregnant. She is convinced that the child she will bear will be a boy. "I will accept him as my baby," she says. She does not hesitate about this; there is no question in her mind that this is what she should do. But it does not make her happy. "I am very sad for what happened to me," she says. "I will accept him but I will always think of him as an Arab, someone who is not from my tribe." When the Janjaweed eventually left Kilek, the people abandoned what was left of their homes, those that had not been burned to the ground. Fatima went with them, walking to Kass to join the thousands of others who had made their way there. They carried with them a few possessions, a couple of pans, some clothes, and they built a shelter from sticks and brush wood. Every day, more people arrive in Kass, building their new homes among the huts of the town. Some have moved into the schools to find shelter from the rains that fall every night now. A plastic sheeting handed out by the aid agencies offered little protection in the rain, torrential downpours that beat down for hours. the water finds a way through and washes across the ground, soaking everything. There are 40,000 people in Kass who have abandoned their own homes and Fatima is not the only one among them pregnant as a result of the rapes. Families huddle together inside their shelters, but there is no respite and little room to lie down and sleep. When Fatima does find a place to rest, she dreams. "I dream about the village and the fires, the houses being burned, but never the people who did this to me," she says. The shelter in which Fatima sits belongs to Omer Ibrahim Abdul Wahab. He fled from the village of Karlik, 30km away, with his wife and ten children when the Janjaweed attacked. At first they went to hide in the hills. Once the Janjaweed had left they moved back into the deserted village and stayed there for eight days without food, too afraid to move. It took them three days on foot to reach the relative safety of Kass. But before they escaped the Janjaweed grabbed Abdul's daughter, Asha Mohamed Sadig. They were convinced there were rebels in the village; they ordered her to tell them where the fighters were. When she could not do so - she said there were no fighters in the village, they lashed her with animal whips. At first, Asha says they raped her but then she changes her story. "My friends were made to do this," she says. "They took them to the wadi far away to rape them." Even now, she says, the women are not safe. The problem is that they have to go for wood outside Kass town. "If they go outside they risk capture," she says. "This has happened to some of the women living in the town. Once the Janjaweed have finished with them, they let them come back at sunset." The road to Kass is harsh, riddled with potholes. Now that the rains have started, many of the potholes have become deep pools of water. The road passes through lush countryside. In some of the villages, there are people carrying on with their lives. But they are not the original inhabitants; there are Arabs who have moved into the abandoned homes of the black African farmers who once lived there. Once, the Arab tribes would have passed through these places on their animals, paying to graze them on the fertile plain; now, they are masters of the land, and their animals graze for free. The Janjaweed, too, move unaffected. At the roadside, one of their soldiers leans against the parapet of a bridge, his AK47 cradled in his lap. He is wearing army fatigues and a peaked camouflage cap. He waves the vehicles of aid convoys through, but lorries will pay him a toll. Further along the road, there's another Janjaweed on horseback, leading a second horse. The man does not look up, or acknowledge the presence of the passing vehicles. He shows no sign of concern, fears no threat. This is the border of south and west Darfur. This is his country now.
|
|
||||
|
................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
|||||||
