Rape campaign continues in Darfur-aid agency

By Opheera Mcdoom

KHARTOUM, March 7 (Reuters) – About 500 women in Darfur have been treated for rape in recent months and most said their attackers were militiamen or soldiers, according to an aid agency report obtained by Reuters on Monday.

A displaced Sudanese pregnant mother embraces her daughter at Kalma camp near Nyala south Darfur October 7, 2004. The mother said she was a victim of rape by Janjaweed, Arab militia members.

But the real number of rape victims is likely to be even higher as many are afraid to report the crime for fear of stigmatisation and mistreatment, said the study prepared by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

U.N. aid chief Jan Egeland said he fully supported the report and that the criminals must be brought to justice, adding the government could not continue to allow impunity.

“The problem is acute — it’s wide ranging. Sudan never had this kind of systematic rape before,” said Egeland, the U.N. Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

“Now Sudan has the same problem that we see in many other African and other conflicts and the Sudanese government has to face up to this,” he told reporters in Khartoum.

The government in the predominantly Muslim country has accused media and aid groups of exaggerating the extent of rape during a more than two-year-old rebellion in the arid region.

The MSF study said more than 80 percent of the victims reported that their attackers were militiamen or soldiers. It did not specify whether the militiamen included rebel factions.

BEATEN AND RAPED

In anonymous accounts, it described how three women in West Darfur state were beaten and raped by five men last October.

“After they abused us, they told us that now we would have Arab babies; and if they would find any Fur women, they would rape them again to change the colour of their children,” the women said in the report.

The Fur is one of three non-Arab tribes who form the majority of the almost 2 million people displaced in Darfur, where rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing Khartoum of neglecting the westerm region and favouring Arab tribes.

Darfur rebels say Arab militias the government armed to help put down their uprising have conducted a campaign of village-burning and rape. The government denies links with the militia, known as Janjaweed.

The MSF head of mission in Sudan, Paul Foreman, said the government had asked the agency not to publish the report, which will be released on Tuesday for international women’s day.

“They have expressed their strong desire that we don’t publish it, and I politely declined,” he told Reuters.

The report said that in one of the three Darfur states between October and mid-February, MSF clinics treated 297 rape victims between the ages of 12 and 45.

Given the victims’ sense of shame and the threat of imprisonment for illegal pregnancy in Sudan, where Islamic sharia law is enforced, the MSF “strongly believes that the numbers recorded are only a partial representation of the real number of victims”.

Women are held captive for days and raped by multiple attackers, and many are beaten, the report said. Some are ostracised from their communities and others have been arrested.

Egeland said he did not expect MSF would be threatened with expulsion, as aid groups Oxfam and Save the Children UK were for reports the authorities disagreed with last year.

“MSF is doing most of the medical work in Darfur and we are totally reliant on their continued access to Darfur,” he said.