Save us from hell of Darfur, say refugees

Save us from hell of Darfur, say refugees

Women who have fled the violence of Sudan are facing discrimination in a culture which fails to distinguish between adultery and rape

Mariella Frostrup in Djabal refugee camp, Chad
Sunday September 9, 2007
The Observer


There are some stories you instantly want to forget, but they are often the ones that remain with you forever. In a hushed and claustrophobically hot room in eastern Chad, sitting on a hard mud floor scattered with rush mats, my own worst nightmares were brought to life by another woman's story.

You will have read about the conflict in Darfur, of the rapes and mutilations, of an estimated 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million forced to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families. Despite endless United Nations initiatives, the attention of our Prime Minister and President Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and the campaigning of such celebrities as George Clooney and Mia Farrow, it remains for most of us a distant conflict in a world scarred by many such battles. Jaded from daily TV channel-hopping, we shrug off another genocide.

It seems both intangible and hopeless. Until you find yourself inches from a woman like Hawaye, her baby daughter Nadjva sucking on her malnourished breast as she tells us what drove her from Sudan to the Djabal refugee camp where we sit. 'They came at seven to our village, the janjaweed militia,' she says, the fact that she mentions the time seeming a poignant effort to give some structure to the evil that followed. Her husband was away when the rebels arrived and set about their business - the livestock rounded up, homes torched, men and boys mutilated and murdered, and finally the moment that she replays over and over, when one of the horsemen rode up and, with a machete, decapitated the baby that she held in her arms. She didn't have time to mourn. The murderers took her with them and kept her hostage for 15 days, repeatedly raping and violating her before they moved on.

But for many women, surviving is the worst-case scenario. Hawaye was reunited with her husband, but the fact that she had lived made her guilty of complicity in her 'loss of honour'. He divorced her. She briefly got lucky when another refugee with two children married her, a rare occurrence for rape victims, who are seen as unclean. You are no doubt hoping for a happy ending? When he found out about her ordeal, which she had kept secret in fear and shame, he also divorced her. Taking with him three of their four children. Now she lives hand-to-mouth, discriminated against in a misogynistic culture which refuses to differentiate between rape and adultery, even when the crime is being used as a weapon of war against its own women. Hawaye has no hope for the future and lives solely for her only remaining child, her daughter, haunted day and night by the atrocities she has suffered.

I listened to many other first-hand accounts of similar horrors in the company of eight eminent political leaders and campaigners, all women, who had come to the camps to bear witness to what is happening. Led by Ireland's former President Mary Robinson, and including four of Africa's most inspirational women, there wasn't a dry eye among them by the time Hawaye herself broke down. Nigeria's ex-finance minister and former World Bank vice-president Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Kenya's Dr Musimbi Kanyoro, secretary general of the World YWCA, a global movement of 25 million women committed to female empowerment; Bineta Diop, Senegalese founder of Femmes Africa Solidarite; Asha Hagi Elmi Amin, an exiled Somali, member of the transitional parliament in Mogadishu and the Pan African Parliament, and founder of Save Somali Women and Children; none of them strangers to the brutality of war, all silenced by the horror of what we heard.


Continued @ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2165278,00.html


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· The Global Day for Darfur is Sunday 16 September. For more details go to: http://www.globefordarfur.org