Women Risk Rape to Find Food on Front Lines of Darfur Civil War
By Karl Maier

April 04, 2007 - (Bloomberg) Khadija Mohamed and her 18-year-old niece, Mafagara, were riding a donkey back to their village in Sudan's Darfur region when three men carrying AK-47 rifles stopped them and tried to drag the young woman away.

Mohamed, 50, anticipated Mafagara's likely fate. She herself was raped last October as she made the same four-hour journey to fetch food from her old farm and take it back to the refugee camp near the town of Tawilla where she and 40,000 others now live.

"They were going to rape her, and when I tried to stop them, they beat me with a stick on the head,'' Mohamed says, bowing her head to reveal a jagged six-inch gash on the top of her skull. "After that, they left us alone and shouted at us never to come back to the village.''

Tens of thousands of women like Mohamed are caught on the front lines of Darfur's four-year-old civil war, vulnerable to rapes, beatings and abductions, according to the United Nations and aid groups such as Doctors Without Borders. Shortages of food and firewood force them to take calculated risks, leaving the relative safety of the camps to scavenge in the countryside.

When they do, they often confront bands of armed men ranging from Sudanese soldiers and their Arab militia allies, known as Janjaweed, to former rebels who've made peace with the government and other insurgents who haven't.

The women say they have no choice but to go out alone because it's too dangerous for men to accompany them.

"We need the food and the wood to survive,'' Mohamed says, sitting in the sand outside her thatched hut."Our men can't go to protect us because they will be killed. We women will only be raped.''

200,000 Dead

More than 200,000 people have died in Darfur, mostly through disease and hunger, according to UN statistics. Another 2 million have fled their homes since the conflict erupted in February 2003, when insurgents championing Darfur's African tribes attacked the Arab-dominated government to demand a greater share of political power and the country's oil wealth.

The refugees in Tawilla, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Darfur's main city, El Fasher, have no land to farm and are virtually cut off from the outside world.

International aid agencies pulled out in June after rebels stole their vehicles and threatened relief workers. The UN's World Food Program still provides about 723 metric tons of food for the Tawilla camp every two months, enough for each person to receive half the daily minimum ration.

Firewood Patrols

The camp, which sprang up around an African Union peacekeeping base, is a maze of huts built from grass, plastic sheeting and dried millet stalks. The 250 soldiers, mainly from Rwanda, live in rows of white tents, enjoy three meals a day and hot showers, and can watch European soccer matches live on satellite TV.

The troops are the refugees' sole source of protection, yet they too are fearful, restricting their visits to the camp to daylight hours and only in convoys of pickup trucks packed with armed soldiers.

While the AU's 7,000 troops and civilian police in Darfur escort women in search of food and fuel, the so-called firewood patrols take place sporadically because the force doesn't have enough soldiers to cover a region two-thirds the size of France.

"You are talking about providing protection for camps, escorting people to gather firewood, grass for their animals,'' says Major General Luke Aprezi, the Nigerian officer who commands the AU force in Darfur. "The force cannot do that one job alone. Then you have to patrol villages, investigate violations, dominate the ground, it's just not possible.''

Peacekeepers Ambushed

Five AU soldiers from Senegal died in an ambush by unknown gunmen April 1 in northwestern Darfur. It was the worst attack against the peacekeepers since they arrived three years ago and pushed the death toll among their forces to 15.

President Umar al-Bashir agreed during an Arab League summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 29 to allow the expansion of the AU force to as many as 20,000 troops and to accept UN assistance in peacekeeping.

Bashir regularly dismisses reports of widespread violence and rejects accounts of rape.

"It is not in the Sudanese culture or people of Darfur to rape,'' Bashir said March 17 in an interview with the U.S. television network NBC. "It doesn't exist. We don't have it.''
Yet the Justice Ministry has established an office to deal with rape and attacks on women.

"My office is trying to institutionalize the issue within the government,'' says Dr. Attiat Moustafa, director of the Office for Combating Violence Against Women. "People didn't talk about gender-based violence in the past, and now people even in the traditional areas are discussing violence against women.''

Exaggerated Statistics

Her office has set up committees in Darfur's three states to work with local authorities and women's groups. It is also helping train female police investigators.

Still, Moustafa says human rights groups exaggerate the problem of rape in Darfur to mobilize world leaders to push Sudan to accept UN peacekeepers.

"Gender-based violence is not of the magnitude that they are talking about,'' says Moustafa, a pediatrician by training.

After the Dutch wing of Medecins sans Frontieres said it treated 500 rape victims in south and west Darfur from October 2004 to February 2005, the government arrested the group's head of mission and Darfur coordinator on charges of publishing false information and spying. The charges were later dropped.

Aid Groups Silenced

The New York-based International Rescue Committee came under so much pressure from the government after reporting the rapes of 200 women last August at the Kalma camp in southern Darfur that its representatives in Sudan say they can't discuss the issue.

The incidence of rape in Darfur exploded after the start of the war, with rights groups blaming government soldiers and their Janjaweed allies.

"Historically, in intertribal conflict, this is one of the weapons of shaming rivals,'' says Charles Mironko, a Rwandan human rights monitor for the African Union. "Raping women is a way of demonstrating one group's power over another.''

Mohamed says she doesn't know the identity of the men who attacked her on Feb. 17, only that they spoke the Zaghawa language and wore military uniforms. Zaghawa fighters in the area are mainly loyal to the faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army that signed a peace deal with the government last May.

That faction is led by Minni Minnawi, who is now a special adviser to President Bashir.

Rebel Rivalries

Mohamed is a Fur, the largest ethnic group in Darfur. The Fur are mostly loyal to a faction led by Abdel Wahid Mohamed el- Nur, who has refused to sign the peace accord. Nur and Minnawi, once united in the SLA, are now rivals.

"It is an easy way, that requires no weapons, for a few to intimidate and demoralize many, both women and their men folk,'' says Irene Schmid, deputy director of the Protection of Civilians Office at the UN mission in Sudan. "The very real threat of sexual violence has a dramatic impact on women's lives, as it restricts their freedom of movement, their ability to make a living and to care for their families.''

Tawilla has no government and no police, only a few dozen young SLA fighters loyal to Minni Minnawi and a handful of government soldiers perched on the rocky hill behind the AU camp.

Unless they need medical attention, women increasingly decide not to report assaults to the AU because the attackers are never caught, says Abdalla Mohamed Ali, a local community leader, or sheikh. The AU has no mandate to arrest assailants.

Unwanted Pregnancies

Sheikh Ali says women report rape to him and other sheikhs because if they don't and later become pregnant, they may be charged with adultery under Islamic law.

"These attacks on women happen so often now, and they are completely against Islam,'' he says. "Just a few days ago, some Janjaweed came to our water hole north of here and stole the water pump and raped some women.''

Mohamed says she was first attacked in October, when she and four other women were raped by 15 armed men. At the time, she vowed never to return to her village of Kounda. But the passage of time steeled her courage to venture out again.

She says one of her neighbors, Fatima, is already making trips outside the camp to search for firewood just 10 days after being raped.

"It's the same with me because I have no choice but to go back to my village,'' Mohamed says. "Everything I own and my crops are there.''

 

From:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=atC45FRN.hl0&refer=home