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Rape and Sexual Violence during Attacks by Government Forces and Militias

Accounts gathered by Human Rights Watch over the past fourteen months largely corroborate the research conducted by other organizations investigating sexual violence.⁹ The International Commission of Inquiry concluded that rape and sexual violence have been used by government forces and government-backed Janjaweed militias as a “deliberate strategy with the aim of terrorizing the population, ensuring control of the movement of the IDP population and perpetuating its displacement.”¹⁰ Human Rights Watch has documented numerous incidents, in all three states of Darfur, in which women and girls have been subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence during Sudanese government attacks on villages, including multiple rapes by multiple attackers from government forces and militias.

Human Rights Watch documented rapes by multiple perpetrators of large numbers of women and girls from different ethnic groups targeted by Sudanese government forces and militias.¹¹ For example, a thirty-five-year-old Fur woman and mother of five children, from Krolli village, South Darfur, told Human Rights Watch that when the Janjaweed militias attacked her village many of the village residents gathered in the police station, seeking protection. The police took no action. Civilians were held there for several days while the militia selected young women for rape and men were shot and tortured if they protested. She said:

Janjaweed would pass their hands touching the heads and legs of women, if a woman has long hair and fat legs and silky skin she is immediately taken away to be raped. There was panic among all of us and we could not move. They took girls away for long hours and brought them back later. Girls were crying, we knew they raped them. Some of us were raped in front of the crowd….I was sitting with the others on the bare floor, very exhausted, thirsty and scared. Two of them came to me, I resisted them and told them I did not want them but they did not like that. They hit me and decided to rape me in front of others, one of them came to me from the back and started raping me….I could not move after that. Some young men tried to protect us from [rape], they received shots in both their legs. That was very painful and made them bleed, they could not move any more. Others were hanged on the tree naked….It was just killing us to be raped and to see our men tortured like that.¹²

A forty-year-old Fur woman from a village in South Darfur told Human Rights Watch of a similar attack.  When the Janjaweed militia members tried to rape her fourteen-year-old daughter she said:

I covered her with my body and prevented them from taking her. They became very angry, they lashed me and decided to have me. They took my tope (outer garment worn by many Sudanese women) off and tore my dress while I was resisting them. They took me a bit far from the group and started raping me. One would rape while two others would guard him. There were about thirty women in the same place….They took their turns raping me, after that they hit me hard, took me on the floor back to the crowd and threw me beside them.¹³

Rape and sexual violence have specifically been used to terrorize and displace rural communities. In some attacks documented by Human Rights Watch, girls as young as seven and eight years old were raped, while some women were raped and then genitally mutilated. Human Rights Watch was told of one such attack, on a Zaghawa community in Goz Baggar, North Darfur, on October 18, 2004, which caused many of the village residents to flee to Chad. “Some women and girls were raped, another time, all on one day, on October 18, 2004. Other women were raped in different ways. The men didn’t just rape them but afterwards they cut their sexual parts and sewed them up. Fifty Janjaweed committed this crime on the same day, it resulted in many people leaving for Chad.”¹⁴

According to accounts gathered by Human Rights Watch, perpetrators of rape have frequently abused the women and girls with vitriolic racial and ethnic slurs during or after the rapes, calling women “slaves,” “dirty black Nuba,” and other epithets. A Fur woman who was raped by three men during an attack on her village, near Kass town, was told by her attackers, “You Fur women of 111 [referring to the pattern of scarification popular among Fur women: three parallel lines on the upper cheeks] are needed. For each ‘1’ on your face you have a job. The first ‘1 is to bake kisra (a Sudanese staple food) for [Sudan president] Omar el Bashir, the second ‘1’ is to be the slave of el Bashir, the third ‘1’ is to do whatever el Bashir wants from you.”¹⁵

As reflected in the cases described above and dozens of additional incidents documented by Human Rights Watch,¹⁶ these incidents of rape clearly aimed to subjugate, humiliate and terrorize the entire community, not just the women and girls raped by the militias.

Government soldiers have also been responsible for rape during attacks on villages and when women and girls travel on the roads to attend local markets. A woman who was raped by five soldiers when she was traveling to the market at Abdu Shakur, North Darfur to get food, told Human Rights Watch that they ordered her off her donkey. When she refused she was whipped and then raped by all five men. She said, “They were regular soldiers, with no rank….They wore army uniforms and one had a Kalashnikov [assault rifle]. The police have red caps. There were two with red caps but the others were bareheaded. They whipped me with two whips, used by three men….I said nothing, I could not scream. I was raped by all five. I did not report the rape because they were government soldiers.”¹⁷