Mick Hartley

A useful reminder in this article in the Sunday Times (with accompanying pictures) that the era of Arab slave trading is only a generation or so ago:

As soon as she saw the two darkly clad men riding towards her on camels, their heads and faces swathed in scarves, Nafisa Mohamed knew what she must do. “I told my son and my daughter to run as fast as they could.” The men were the Janjaweed, nomadic Arab bandits who have been slaughtering Darfuri men and raping women, in a military offensive engineered by the Sudanese government. Jinn is Arabic for demon and jawad means horse. Darfuri people will tell you that the Janjaweed are indeed devils on horseback. Nafisa had been living for a year in Kalma camp, which houses about 120,000 Darfuri people who have had their homes destroyed by the Janjaweed. On this day she walked several miles away from the camp with two of her children to collect firewood. When the men approached, she feared they would try to kill her 13-year-old son and rape her 11-year-old daughter, but thought that if she surrendered herself and submitted they wouldn’t bother chasing her children. She knew they might kill her. Certainly they’d rape her.

The first man went off in pursuit of other women, while the second tore off her tobe, a large veil that covers the head and body, and screamed at her: “Unclean slave! I will give you a pale-skinned baby.” Then he thrust himself upon her so violently, she bled: “Slave woman! Your children will be Arabs, and they will inherit this land.” […]

Darfur is a complex African crisis, rooted in violent ethnic and historical factors, and recently exacerbated by drought and famine. Most of Darfur’s 6m people are either farmers or nomadic herders. Most farmers are African and most nomads Arab. Until recently, the two groups mixed fairly easily. Competition between the tribes tended to be economic rather than ethnic. The three main African tribes are the Fur, who are also the largest, the Zaghawa and the Masalit. Almost everyone is Muslim, speaks Arabic and has dark skin.

The recent violence also has its roots in the cultural legacy of slavery, now outlawed. Until little more than a generation ago, Darfur was Sudan’s slave-trading ground. For many Arab Sudanese, Darfuri women are seen as beautiful, sexually generous and comparatively liberated. By some Arabs they are seen as fit for little more than slavery or prostitution.

Earlier this year, in a dizzying vindication of lawless Janjaweed behaviour, the Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal summarised the contempt the Janjaweed feel for Darfuri women: “Why would you want to rape these women? They’re disgusting; rape is shameful. We have honour, but our men wouldn’t need to use force. These things hold no shame for these women.”

Some rural Darfuri women are not circumcised – certainly none of those I spoke to was – unlike Sudanese Arab women, who are often subjected to an extreme form of genital mutilation. To the Janjaweed, this is conclusive proof that many Darfuri women are unclean.

Women in Darfur who report rapes are risking their lives and stand more chance of being prosecuted than the rapists. (Earlier this year two women were sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery, although their sentences have yet to be executed.) In sharia law, a woman needs four male witnesses to testify to a rape. If she is married, reports a rape but doesn’t have these witnesses, she may be prosecuted for adultery and stoned to death. The Khartoum government has always vehemently denied that its soldiers rape women. Because of what one Sudanese human-rights activist describes as the government’s ongoing objection to the focus of rape in Darfur, the official statistics for last year’s rape cases amounted to a paltry seven. The Janjaweed, like the police and the rest of the military, enjoy immunity.

Six months ago, Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, publicly denied that rape had ever been a problem in Darfur. “It’s not in the Sudanese culture to rape,” he said. “Rape doesn’t exist.” In the teeth of such denial, non-governmental organisations risk being expelled from Darfur if they speak out. In 2005, when Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) published a damning report on the scale of rape, two senior members were arrested – a stark warning to other NGOs. Later that year, police arrested a rape victim in Nyala who’d gone to a clinic for help.

Earlier this year, after lengthy negotiations with the government, a delegation from the US-based group Refugees International arrived in Khartoum to investigate rape in Darfur. They were ordered to leave Sudan within 24 hours.