Sudanese army troops raped at least 221 women and girls in Darfur village in a series of organised house-to-house attacks last year, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Wednesday.
The organisation’s Africa director, Daniel Bekele, called it “a new low in the catalogue of atrocities in Darfur.”
The incident is at the heart of a recent plunge in relations between Sudan and the international community over a region gripped by violent
chaos for more than a decade.
Reports of a mass rape in Tabit in late October quickly surfaced via radio broadcasts by Sudanese overseas. A joint UN-African Union
peacekeeping mission at first said it found no evidence, but the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict said a heavy
Sudanese military presence during its visit likely affected its findings.
The Security Council demanded that Sudan allow a full investigation. Instead, President Omar al-Bashir ordered the UN mission’s human rights office to close and has refused to allow the peacekeeping mission to visit the village again.
Sudan’s government says its own investigation found “there had not been a single case of rape.”
But the new report, based on more than 130 telephone interviews with survivors, witnesses and army defectors, says girls as young as 10 were raped by Sudanese forces, and that some women and girls were assaulted multiple times and in front of their families.
The report says Human Rights Watch “documented 27 separate incidents of rape and obtained credible information about an additional 194 cases.”
One question is why it happened. Witnesses and survivors said army forces ordered dozens of men to the outskirts of the village while
soldiers entered homes and accused residents of killing a soldier or helping rebel groups, then raped the women and girls.
The report found no evidence in the village of rebel forces, which have been fighting the government since 2003 across the vast region of
western Sudan. More than 300 000 have been killed in the conflict, and more than 400 000 fled their homes last year alone.
Source: TVC News