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Kenya News & Notes

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[Last updated Monday, June 13, 2005]
There will be news update hiatus until July 11!

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Isla de Mendez, El Salvador, 2003, Justin List

Published: June 5, 2005

NYALA, Sudan

All countries have rapes, of course. But here in the refugee shantytowns of Darfur, the horrific stories that young women whisper are not of random criminality but of a systematic campaign of rape to terrorize civilians and drive them from "Arab lands" - a policy of rape.

One measure of the international community's hypocrisy is that the world is barely bothering to protest. More than two years after the genocide in Darfur began, the women of Kalma Camp - a teeming squatter's camp of 110,000 people driven from their burned villages - still face the risk of gang rape every single day as they go out looking for firewood.

Nemat, a 21-year-old, told me that she left the camp with three friends to get firewood to cook with. In the early afternoon a group of men in uniforms caught and gang-raped her.

"They said, 'You are black people. We want to wipe you out,' " Nemat recalled. After the attack, Nemat was too injured to walk, but her relatives found her and carried her back to camp on a donkey.

A neighbor, Toma, 34, said she heard similar comments from seven men in police uniforms who raped her. "They said, 'We want to finish you people off,' " she recalled.

Sometimes the women simply vanish. A young mother named Asha cried as she told how she and her four sisters were chased down by a Janjaweed militia; she escaped but all her sisters were caught.

"To this day, I don't know if they are alive or dead," she sobbed. Then she acknowledged that she had another reason for grief: a Janjaweed militia had also murdered her husband 23 days earlier.

Gang rape is terrifying anywhere, but particularly so here. Women who are raped here are often ostracized for life, even forced to build their own huts and live by themselves. In addition, most girls in Darfur undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation that often ends with a midwife stitching the vagina shut with a thread made of wild thorns. This stitching and the scar tissue make sexual assault a particularly violent act, and the resulting injuries increase the risk of H.I.V. transmission.

Sudan has refused to allow aid groups to bring into Darfur more rape kits that include medication that reduces the risk of infection from H.I.V.

The government has also imprisoned rape victims who became pregnant, for adultery. Even those who simply seek medical help are harassed and humiliated.

On March 26, a 17-year-old student named Hawa went to a French-run clinic in Kalma and reported that she had been raped. A French midwife examined her and confirmed that she was bleeding and had been raped.

But an informer in the clinic alerted the police, who barged in and - over the determined protests of two Frenchwomen - carried Hawa off to a police hospital, where she was chained to a cot by one leg and one arm. A doctor there declared that she had not been raped after all, and Hawa was then imprisoned for a couple of days. The authorities are now proposing that she be charged with submitting false information.

The attacks are sometimes purely about humiliation. Some women are raped with sticks that tear apart their insides, leaving them constantly trickling urine. One Sudanese woman working for a European aid organization was raped with a bayonet.

Doctors Without Borders issued an excellent report in March noting that it alone treated almost 500 rapes in a four-and-a-half-month period. Sudan finally reacted to the report a few days ago - by arresting an Englishman and a Dutchman working for Doctors Without Borders.

Those women who spoke to me risked arrest and lifelong shame by telling their stories. Their courage should be an inspiration to us - and above all, to President Bush - to speak out. Mr. Bush finally let the word Darfur pass his lips on Wednesday, after 142 days of silence, but only during a photo op. Such silence amounts to acquiescence, for this policy of rape flourishes only because it is ignored.

I'm still chilled by the matter-of-fact explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even though they're the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the first genocide of the 21st century.

"It's simple," one woman here explained. "When the men go out, they're killed. The women are only raped."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/opinion/05kristof.html

New CrisisWatch bulletin from the International Crisis Group


01/06/2005

CrisisWatch No.22, 1 June 2005

Thirteen conflict situations around the world deteriorated in May 2005, according to this month's edition of CrisisWatch.* In Uzbekistan, following months of public unrest, government troops in the eastern city of Andijon fired indiscriminately into protesters, killing as many as 750 mostly unarmed civilians, including women and children. More than 570 were killed in a wave of violence in Iraq. Pakistan suffered sectarian attacks that left dozens dead, and at least 19 were killed in violent anti-U.S. demonstrations in Afghanistan.

Lethal bomb blasts shook Central Sulawesi in Indonesia, site of serious Christian-Muslim fighting in 1999-2001. In the most serious attack on the Burmese capital Yangon in recent history, three coordinated blasts killed at least 19 and injured 162. Fifteen died in clashes in Somalia, threatening the fragile transitional government. Amid continued economic decline and fears of famine, conditions in Zimbabwe further worsened when the government announced plans for the demolition of shacks home to one million urban poor. The situations also deteriorated last month in Angola, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea and Turkey.

May 2005 also brought improvements to the conflict situations in six countries. Georgia had a positive month with the signing of a major agreement that plots the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia by the end of 2008. Relations across the Taiwan Strait took a step for the better as China announced a lifting of its ban on most travel to the island. The peace process in Cote d'Ivoire made limited progress with a deal on disarmament. The situations also improved in Central African Republic, Kyrgyzstan, and the Philippines.

For June 2005, CrisisWatch identifies the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia and Uzbekistan as Conflict Risk Alerts, or situations at particular risk of new or significantly escalated conflict in the coming month. No new Conflict Resolution Opportunities were identified for June.

 

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