Darfur fighting deprives women of their menfolk
By Simon Apiku
GENEINA, Sudan, June 26 (AFP) — Kofi Annan and Colin Powell will be struck by one feature of the refugee camps and villages of Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region when they visit next week – they are almost solely inhabited by women and children.
The number of men, particularly in the villages, has declined dramatically since the eruption of the conflict in February last year between government forces and black African rebels of the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality movement, according to locals and international aid agencies in the region.
Men have either joined the insurgency and met their fate on the battlefield, died at the hands of the Khartoum-backed Arab Janjawid militia who roam the region on camel-back, destroying everything on their way, or simply fled for fear of their lives.
“The killers primarily targeted men, who accounted for three out of every four deaths,” according to a recent report by the French humanitarian group, Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
MSF based the report on a survey the agency carried out in the Mornay camp located southeast of Geneina, capital of West Darfur state.
Mornay, which used to be a village of about 5,000, now hosts some 80,000 people displaced from nearby villages, the majority of them women, says MSF.
During a recent visit to the camp, French Deputy Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier, gave his first impressions: “A lot of women and children, very few men.”
“They murdered my husband about four months ago,” says Hawa Mohammed, a mother of six now living at the Riyadh camp outside Geneina that shelters several thousand Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), the majority of them women.
Many say they lost their husbands, fathers and brothers, as well their meagre belongings to the notorious Janjaweed.
“We have nothing left,” adds Mohammed, who now has to raise her six children on her own.
Gamra Adam says that her husband and brothers also died at the hands of the Janjawid, adding, “My husband grew up as an orphan, now his children will grow up without a father.”
Fatna Abdallah, 16, has been living with an uncle in the camp since her entire family was murdered, their livestock stolen and houses burned to the ground. “I lost everything,” she says.
Says one woman: “They murdered all the men they could find.”
This means that in addition to their traditional roles of preparing food, fetching water and collecting firewood, the women must now taken over the roles of their lost husbands, fathers and brothers, tremendously increasing their burden as they struggle to make ends meet.
They look after the few cattle and sheep that survived successive Janjawid raids and ride donkeys deep into the heart of this semi-desert region in search of wood and animal feed, which they in turn take to the market.
For most of the time, the children are on their own, playing around the dingy little structures they have learned to call home.
On June 19 Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir promised to rein in and disarm the Janjawid and other militia groups in the area that have been blamed for much of the atrocities and abuses in Darfur.
The government has also been encouraging the IDPs to return to their villages, saying the security situation there was “under control” and improving, a claim contested by aid agencies operating in the area and the locals themselves.
“The men who survived the initial killing spree cannot leave without risking death…” the MSF report added.
And even if the situation eventually improves, as the government has promised and the people return to their villages, most women will find themselves forced to learn to farm and rebuild grass-thatched mud huts destroyed by the Janjawid, a traditionally male task.
The United Nations secretary general and the US secretary of state will meet in Sudan next week to press Khartoum over the situation in Darfur, where international agencies have warned of a humanitarian disaster.