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 دارفور ... جرائم النظام ضد المدنيين !
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Darfur women 'kept as ####### slaves after kidnap by Sudanese army'
By Benjamin Joffe-Walt
9-19-2004
The Telegraph UK
A woman and teenage girl who were raped and abducted by soldiers in Western Darfur have claimed that the Sudanese army organised airlifts of ####### slaves to serve as the "wives" of government soldiers in Khartoum.
Their accounts appear to corroborate claims made privately by Sudanese and United Nations officials, and are the latest evidence that government forces are involved in activities which Khartoum blames on the Janjaweed militia.
"The army captured many children and women hiding in the bush outside burnt villages," said a senior politician in Khartoum who is familiar with the cases but asked not to be named.
"They were transported by plane to Khartoum at night, and divided up among soldiers as domestic workers and in some cases wives."
The two women, from different villages, were abducted almost a year apart - yet their accounts reveal chilling similarities of a systematic process run by the country's military.
One victim, Bokur Hamis, 21, who eventually escaped and is now in hiding in Soba, on the outskirts of Khartoum, claimed that she was seized from Jartage, her home village, last year. "Soldiers attacked with heavy guns," she said.
"Most of the men in the village were unarmed, and they were killed."
The women headed to a nearby lake and tried to hide under the water but were caught.
"Each of us was raped by between three and six men," said Bokur. "One woman refused to have ####### with them, so they split her head into pieces with an axe in front of us."
The soldiers tried to bundle her into a truck, she said. "I refused, so one of them hit me with a cane, broke my rib, then threw me in. They took 43 of us in Land Cruisers and drove for two days without food or water."
She looked down at the ground and spoke more slowly. "In the middle of the night we reached a place with lights and they put us directly on a huge aeroplane. I thought they'd kill me.
There were girls from other villages, I knew about 10." On the plane, as the escorting soldiers gloated at the number of girls they had taken, their captives sat in fearful silence.
"When we arrived at a base in Khartoum, the soldiers were each given money," Bokur said.
A commander inspected the women, she said.
"Each woman was given to a soldier, now I don't know where any of them are. I was given to an Arab soldier, taken to his house and locked inside. Every night he used me like a wife. For two months I did not see the outside."
Baxit Zaruuk, 14, who was kidnapped from the village of Mokjar, has a similar story. "The soldiers and Janjaweed came into the village and threatened to kill us if we didn't go with them," she said.
She also was taken to an airfield, where she said that there were 25 girls from different areas. "They put us all on two planes, each with about 100 soldiers.
In Khartoum we were all taken to a place along the Nile and raped at gunpoint." She was handed to a soldier as his "wife".
Both Bokur and Baxit escaped - in Bokur's case, by persuading her soldier "husband" that she was lonely and he should take her on an outing.
With her husband listening, but unable to follow the tribal language, she began talking to a female street vendor whom she recognised as a member of her Darfurian tribe.
"He said he'd put a bullet in my head if I said anything about my problem," she recalled. "But he couldn't understand anything I was saying."
The woman told Bokur where to find distant relatives from her part of Darfur, and Bokur convinced the soldier that if he let her go she would say he was her husband.
In Soba she found an uncle, who spoke to The Sunday Telegraph on condition of anonymity. He had heard that many of "our girls" had been kidnapped by the army from the villages of Darfur, he said.
"When she appeared with that man I didn't believe him, because during this war no Darfurian would marry an Arab soldier. Eventually he admitted he had kidnapped her and asked permission to marry her. I refused."
Over the following weeks, the soldier repeatedly returned seeking permission to marry the woman whom he had helped abduct, but Bokur was by now in hiding and her uncle refused to tell him where.
Eventually the soldier tried to use a Sudanese Islamic law, under which a prospective husband can ask a court to set aside a family's objection to their daughter being married to him.
"I told the judge I had refused because this girl was kidnapped," the uncle said.
"It became a political case. The judge knew he would be punished if he ruled against the soldier, as it would be tantamount to accepting that the army kidnapped women for forced marriage. But under Sharia law he could not marry them without family consent."
Instead, after a six-month court case, the soldier gave up. Bokur's mother travelled across the country to Khartoum as soon as she heard that her daughter was found. "I thought she was dead," she said. They hope to return to Darfur but have insufficient money to travel.
Bokur's uncle believes that the case - one of four similar trials - became an embarrassment to the Sudanese authorities, as international scrutiny of Khartoum increased.
In recent weeks both Kofi Annan, the UN general secretary, and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, have visited Sudan. "Since they came the government has been trying to settle and hide these cases," the uncle said.
Critics of the Sudanese government say that the cases of the two girls - both of whose names have been changed to protect them - are evidence of official wrongdoing.
"It takes a lot of co-ordination to kidnap 40 women from different parts of rural Darfur and fly them all secretly to Khartoum for forced marriage. This must have been agreed upon by senior politicians," said a dissenting parliamentarian.
"It is solid proof of collusion between the government and the army in rape, abduction and slavery of children and women."
The Sudanese government adamantly denied the women's claims, saying they were feeding anti-Arab propaganda.
"These things simply do not happen," one senior Sudanese diplomat said. "Such stories are a conspiracy of the West to discredit the government of Sudan.
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