In a recent column for the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff urged the incoming Bush administration to take seriously the long standing reports coming from Sudan of the use of rape and sexual slavery as a weapon of war by the government there.
Ever since it achieved independence, Sudan has seen almost constant civil war. The war falls along geographical and religious divides with the Muslim majority in northern Sudan squaring off against the Christian and animist majority in the south. The government of General Omar Hassan al-Bashir is overtly Muslim, but faces numerous rebel movements in the south.
It has long been known that al-Bashir’s government tolerates the enslavement of Christians and animists, and several American organizations have caused a great deal of controversy by raising money to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan.
Hentoff writes about recent Christian Solidarity international report that the government’s Popular Defence Forces “systematically gang-raped and enslaved black African women and girls during and after slave raids on villages in southern Sudan…”
Hentoff quotes CSI’s John Eibener saying,
It is the custom for PDF troops to gang-rape enslaved women and girls, and execute those who cannot walk quickly during the forced marches to the north. Once in the north, the slaves are divided amongst their masters and are routinely subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, work without pay, and forced conversions, according to successive United Nations Special Rapporteurs.
Allegations of just such atrocities focused the world’s attention on the conflict in Kosovo, but at least in the United States there has been very little about the ongoing use of slavery and rape by combatant’s in Sudan’s civil war (and a lot of the stories that do make the mainstream media focus on the controversy over Christian efforts to buy Sudanese slaves their freedom).
Source:
Gang rape in Sudan. The Village Voice, February 7-13, 2001.