U.N.: Rape, assault widespread in Darfur

Mike Corder

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Women continue to be subjected to rape by all sides in the brutal conflict in Darfur, the U.N. human rights chief said last Thursday — International Women’s Day.

Louise Arbour said she has about 75 human rights officers monitoring abuses in Darfur, and that many women were being attacked as soon they ventured out of refugee camps to carry out essential chores.

“Women are forced to go out of the camp to collect firewood,” Arbour said at a meeting in The Hague of female leaders in international law. “They believe, they tell us, that if the men went out they would be killed, and that’s why it’s the women who expose themselves and they get raped.”

She said another problem now arising for rape victims is having to bring up children that are the product of sexual attacks.

“These women have children from these rapes — children to whom they cannot give a name because they’re the children of janjaweed,” as the government-backed rebels are known, Arbour said. The janjaweed are blamed for some of the worst atrocities in the Darfur conflict.

“Humanitarian actors on the ground continue to document the absolute rampant use of sexual violence by all groups,” she said.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced since February 2003, when ethnic African tribesmen took up arms, complaining of decades of neglect and discrimination by the Khartoum government. Sudanese authorities responded by unleashing both the military and the janjaweed.

The U.S. State Department issued a report last week calling the campaign by the Sudanese military and its proxy militias against Darfur rebel groups a genocide — a term the U.N. has refrained from applying to Darfur.

“All parties to the conflagration committed serious abuses, including widespread killing of civilians, rape as a tool of war, systematic torture, robbery and recruitment of child soldiers,” the U.S. report said.

Earlier this month, the International Criminal Court named a Sudanese government minister and an alleged janjaweed chief as rape, murder and torture suspects, and asked the court’s judges to call on Khartoum to turn them over. The judges are weighing the evidence, and could take months to issue such an order.

Sudan says it already has set up its own war crimes courts, and does not have to turn over suspects named by the ICC.

Arbour dismissed that argument, saying that if Sudanese authorities wanted to argue that the court had no right to try the men, they should still send them to The Hague and thrash out the matter in court there.

She said it was “grossly inadequate what has been done so far” in Sudanese war crimes prosecutions.

If the ICC issues arrest warrants, for example, “the government of Sudan’s obligation is to arrest and surrender the accused, and then it should make its ... admissibility argument before the court.”

(Associated Press)