Rape used as weapon of war in Darfur – rights groups

Dec 12, 2006 (GENEVA) — Growing numbers of Darfur women and girls are being raped, mainly by Sudan’s forces and allied militias who use sexual violence as a weapon of war with total impunity, human rights activists said on Tuesday.

Suad Abdalaziz, 28, who was raped and became pregnant during a attack by the Jajaweed in the village of Tawila, holds her 3-day-old baby girl.

Victims, who often lack access to medical care and counselling, can be further humiliated under Sudanese law which allows them to be charged with adultery or defamation if they fail to prove rape, they said.

The activists were speaking at a workshop called “Voice from Darfur: Relaying the Victims’ Account”, held on the sidelines of a special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council on Darfur.

The Council, launched last June in a plan to make the U.N. more effective, is debating the dispatch of a mission of inquiry to the troubled western region of Africa’s largest state where aid officials say more than 200,000 people have died in three years of violence.

“We are particularly alarmed by the widespread recourse to rape and other forms of sexual violence as a means of warfare in Darfur, a phenomenon which has been systematically intensified in the last few weeks,” said Osman Hummaida, director of the Sudanese Organisation against Torture.

He cited “daily reports” from camps holding people who have fled violence where women who venture out to gather firewood or water are “abducted, assaulted and raped”. Rapes are committed by all parties including rebel groups, he said.

Khartoum says the human rights situation in Darfur has improved since a peace treaty earlier this year with one leading rebel group. It blames rights violations on rebel groups that are still fighting.

“One of the biggest challenges to accountability in Darfur is the extent to which immunity from prosecution for government agents has been institutionalised both in the Sudanese laws and in practice,” Hummaida said.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour had earlier told the Council that the vast majority of crimes went unpunished at all levels in Darfur, where a simmering ethnic conflict erupted into war in 2003.

The Sudanese Justice Ministry confirmed 39 cases of rape in Darfur between January and June this year, Hummaida said. But according to the U.N., only one conviction has been handed down.

Nevertheless, this marked an improvement on the government’s “previous denial of the existence of rape,” Hummaida added.

Jane Lindrio Alao, a social worker based in Nyala, South Darfur who has counselled rape victims since 2004, said: “Women and children are in need of urgent protection in the three regions of Darfur. We have a whole traumatised community.”

(Reuters)