Darfur Women Describe Gang-Rape Horror

[Behind the Aegis]

Source: Associated Press

KALMA, Sudan (AP) -- The seven women pooled money to rent a donkey and cart, then ventured out of the refugee camp to gather firewood, hoping to sell it for cash to feed their families. Instead, they say, in a wooded area just a few hours walk away, they were gang-raped, beaten and robbed.

Naked and devastated, they fled back to Kalma.

"All the time it lasted, I kept thinking: They're killing my baby, they're killing my baby," wailed Aisha, who was seven months pregnant at the time.

The women have no doubt who attacked them. They say the men's camels and their uniforms marked them as janjaweed - the Arab militiamen accused of terrorizing the mostly black African villagers of Sudan's Darfur region.



Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/D/DARFURS_MISERY?SITE=MALOW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[seemslikeadream]

1. A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo

A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U28joj6d1A

A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMMQhHuI9_Y&mode=related&search=

A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biEXCEOy_vs

A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPKcgo4Es8E

A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIM8kVSN8ug

A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (6)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_WEY7xQEhk&mode=related&search=

Untold Suffering in the Congo

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=9832

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9833

[Tom Joad]

2. The US should stop military aid to Sudan without delay.

[Igel]

4. Absolutely.

"All U.S. military assistance was terminated following the military coup of 1989. Oil revenues have allowed the government to purchase modern weapons systems, including Hind helicopter gunships, Anatov medium bombers, MiG 23 fighter aircraft, mobile artillery pieces, and light assault weapons. Sudan now receives most of its military equipment from China, Russia, and Libya."

"In late 1985, there was a reduction in staff at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum because of the presence in Khartoum of a large contingent of Libyan terrorists. In April 1986, relations with Sudan deteriorated when the U.S. bombed Tripoli, Libya. A U.S. Embassy employee was shot on April 16, 1986. Immediately following this incident, all non-essential personnel and all dependents left for six months. At this time, Sudan was the single largest recipient of U.S. development and military assistance in sub-Saharan Africa. However, official U.S. development assistance was suspended in 1989 in the wake of the military coup against the elected government, which brought to power the National Islamist Front led by General Bashir."

"Sudan’s Islamist links with international terrorist organizations represented a special matter of concern for the U.S. Government, leading to Sudan's 1993 designation as a state sponsor of terrorism and a suspension of U.S. Embassy operations in Khartoum in 1996. In October 1997, the U.S. imposed comprehensive economic, trade, and financial sanctions against the Sudan. In August 1998, in the wake of the East Africa embassy bombings, the U.S. launched cruise missile strikes against Khartoum."

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5424.htm

[Lurking Dem]

3. So incredibly tragic.

And so horribly unnecessary.

[ozone_man]

5. How much of this is a religious conflict?

The term is instead a derivative of the Persian word, jang, "war", and jangawee, "warrior." The term was adopted by the Mahdists in Sudan along with the idea of the Mahdi---a lingering tradition of the old Rustamid Ibadi dynasty of Tunisia who hailed from a Persian background. The Ismaili Shia Fatimids dynasty, who conquered the Rustamids, inherited the term and carried it to Egypt, thence Sudan. The Mahdists showed a strong Shia ideological imprint, although they were Sunnis in their belief. The term Janjaweed is an Arabicized version of Jangawee--, which stood for "faith warriors" among the old Shia communities of North Africa in the medieval times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janjaweed

The news rarely seems to talk of the religious aspects of this conflict. Religion is off limits perhaps?

I agree with Sam Harris in that Islam tends to have violent borders. Look at the number of present religious conflicts. Islam is still a medieval religion. But in general Abrahamic religions tend to be violent.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/curr_war.htm

[Harper_is_Bush]

6. Read this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,,2067637,00.html

[ozone_man]

7. Multiple reasons.

Economic, ethnic, racial and religious differences are generally the underlying causes to various extents. In the Guardian article.

"The real problem here is moral, it is not a question of climate," Said Ibrahim Mustafa, the sultan of the Chadian border region of Dar Sila, says. "It's not just a lack of water that makes a man kill his brother."

Maybe the initial reason is climate change, but that alone doesn't make one group kill the other. If we get our "morals" from religion, that can lead to (the Janjaweed) killing another group who don't have the same religious beliefs. Religion is a divider.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

8. This article sheds some light on the subject...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101752.html

[DrDebug]

9. They should stop big oil funding this war

The janjaweed militia is creating the suffering, however oil companies are providing the funding and arms. It's exactly the same system as used in the War in Congo for Coltan. Local militia are doing the atrocities, foreign governments are backing them, and behind them you have transnational corporations who are getting the natural resources and providing funding for the conflict.

Sudan: Oil Companies Complicit in Rights Abuses

(London, November 25, 2003) - The Sudanese government's efforts to control oilfields in the war-torn south have resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Foreign oil companies operating in Sudan have been complicit in this displacement, and the death and destruction that have accompanied it.

The report, "Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights," ( http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103 / - 3Mb PDF file ) investigates the role that oil has played in Sudan's civil war. This 754-page report is the most comprehensive examination yet published of the links between natural-resource exploitation and human rights abuses.

"Oil development in southern Sudan should have been a cause of rejoicing for Sudan's people," said Jemera Rone, Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch. "Instead, it has brought them nothing but woe."

(...)

The report provides evidence of the complicity of oil companies in the human rights abuses. Oil company executives turned a blind eye to well-reported government attacks on civilian targets, including aerial bombing of hospitals, churches, relief operations and schools.

"Oil companies operating in Sudan were aware of the killing, bombing, and looting that took place in the south, all in the name of opening up the oilfields," said Rone. "These facts were repeatedly brought to their attention in public and private meetings, but they continued to operate and make a profit as the devastation went on."

(...)

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/11/25/sudan6528.htm

In this case it is ironically the Asian oil companies (China National Petroleum Corp., Petrolium Nasional Berhad and ONGC Videsh Ltd.) who are very active in the region, however French and American oil companies have joined them in the quest of more oil.

The current situation is that the Sudan People's Liberation Movement is still in control of the oil fields and the oil companies are still funding and arming them.

Gang rape has been used in Congo as well as a very effective depopulation tool, because it destroys the structure of the tribe and effectively wipes away entire villages, thus enabling the corporations to carry out their exploration in an empty area. Also the soldiers and militia of course like that form of warfare because it's a lot nicer than killing, however it is used a depopulation method.

[DrDebug]

10. The system used in Congo

The following story is worth reading in full. Exactly the same is happening in Darfur as well.

A journey into the most savage war in the world
My travels in the Democratic Vacuum of Congo

This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler’s armies marched across Europe. It is a war that has not ended But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series ‘Lost’, a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very different.

(...)

I – Rapes within rapes.

It starts with a ward full of women who have been gang-raped and then shot in the vagina. I am standing in a makeshift ward in the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the only hospital that is trying to deal with the bushfire of sexual violence in Eastern Congo. Most have wrapped themselves deep in their blankets so I can only see their eyes, staring blankly at me. Dr Denis Mukwege is speaking. “Around ten percent of the gang-rape victims have had this happen to them,” he says softly, his big hands tucked into his white coat. “We are trying to reconstruct their vaginas, their anuses, their intestines. It is a long process.”

(...)

She was only the first. “We suddenly had so many women coming in with post-rape lesions and injuries I could never have imagined. Our minds just couldn’t take in what these women had suffered.” The competing armies had discovered that rape was an efficient weapon in this war. Even in this small province, South Kivu, the UN estimates 45,000 women were raped last year alone. “It destroys the morale of the men to rape their women. Crippling their women cripples their society,” he explains, shaking his head gently. There were so many militias around that Dr Mukwege had to keep his treatments secret – the women were terrified of being kidnapped again and killed. So he became an Oscar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes, treating women undercover for years, taking the risk he would trigger the fickle rage of the drugged-up and freaked-out teenager soldiers marauding across the country.

(...)

As I crawl down into the mine – its cool, damp darkness is a strange contrast to the raging Congolese sun – the miners laugh. The idea of a Muzungu – a white man – in their mine seems to them almost impossibly comic. But they soon get back to picking away at a roof that looks like it could collapse at any moment. Ingo Mbale, 51, explains how the West’s hunger for coltan is fed. “We were enslaved three years ago,” he says. “An RCD captain (from one of the militias) arrived and forced us to mine for them at gun-point. They gave us no money, it was slave labour. There is nothing left in many of these shafts now, they exhausted them. They killed many people. Our gold and coltan and cassiterite went out to the world via Rwanda.” The militia that seized Kalehe could only continue fighting and killing and raping because somebody out there in the wider world was prepared to buy this slave-mined coltan, and somebody else was prepared to sell them guns and artillery with their freshly-minted cash.

Watching these men, the shape of Congo’s recent history becomes clear. There is an official story about the war in Congo, and then there is the reality, uncovered by a trilogy of bomb-blast reports from the UN Panel of Experts on the DRC. The official story is convoluted and hard to follow, because it does not ultimately make sense. But its first chapter is true enough, and goes something like this. In 1996, a Maoist with an eye for money called Laurent-Desire Kabila grew tired of simply running his little fiefdom in eastern Zaire, where he peddled ivory and gold with a nice sideline in kidnapping Westerners. Kabila decided to depose Mobutu, the omnipresent and omni-incompetent tyrant, and seize power for himself. So he cobbled together a rag-tag army of child soldiers known as the Kadogo and – with the support of neighbouring countries Rwanda and Uganda – the edifice of Mobutuism collapsed even before their tinny, tiny advance. Kabila installed himself as another Lepopold-alike, banning political parties and bathing in corruption.

(...)

Once the Congo was drenched in death, the UN commissioned a panel of international statesmen to travel the country and uncover the reasons behind the war. They found that the Rwandan government’s story hid a much darker truth. The Rwandans had one motive, right from the beginning: to seize Congo’s massive mineral wealth, to grab the coltan mine I am standing in now and thousands like it, and to sell it on to us, the waiting world, as we quickly flicked the channel away from the news of this war with our coltan-filled remote control. The other countries came in not because they believed in repelling aggression, but because they wanted a piece of the Congolese cake. The country was ravaged by “armies of business”, commanded by men who “carefully planned the redrawing of the regional map to redistribute wealth,” the UN declared.

(...)

The UN found that a Who’s Who of British, American and Belgian companies collaborated with this crime. The ones they recommended for further investigation included Anglo American PLC, Barclay’s Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and De Beers. The British government barely followed up the report, publicly acquitting a few corporations like Anglo-American who Human Rights Watch have shown to be “in league with some of the worst killers in the region”, and leaving others like De Beers in an “unresolved” and unpunished category.

(...)

“Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms.”

(...)

http://johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=863

[DrDebug]

13. Who's who in Congo's Lost World War

Layer I: Dozens of militia and mercenary firms carrying out the atrocities.

The mass media wants you to focus on the militia alone even though it is so complex and can be called tribal warfare. This is not true, however tribal and ethnic differences are exploited as an effecitve fuel for (civil) war. Just like we observe in Iraq.

Also the mercenary firms like Executive Outcomes, Sandlines, Brown & Root/Halliburton, International Defense and Security, and Military Professional Resources make it clear that there were western powers backing the violence and providing the means. Quite a number of US Special Forces and British SAS troops were discovered among the mercs providing assistence and training.

Layer II: Rwanda, Uganda, and many more African nations.

The conflict started when Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda, invaded Congo. Both Presidents are graduates of the School of the Americas. They were solely motivated by the natural resources. Also bear in mind that both men came to power after bloody and extensive wars in Rwanda and Uganda. How could they invade when their own countries were still suffering from the aftermath of their own atrocities. Yet they had the latest technology and weapons and an endless supply of money for their invasions. Bechtel supplied the satelite images during the invasion with a specific overview of the areas with the greatest mineral wealth and Rwanda and Uganda immediately focused on those areas.

Layer III: United States, United Kingdom, and Belgium.

The three countries with most interests in Congo's natural resources providing major sourcing for Rwanda and Uganda and supplied weapons, trained soldiers for the invasion. It is worth noting that the Belgian corporations and plantations were allowed to continue in Congo/Zaire after its independence under the reign of Mobutu. The corporate interests never left the country after its independence.

Layer IV: Coltan, Gold, and Diamonds

Coltan was the main reason for the invasion. In 1996 the mobile phone industry was starting to become very large, however aluminium capicators cannot be miniaturized. 80% of the world's supply of coltan is in Congo, so it was imperative to get easy access to the Coltan mines, because it would have effectively stopped the growth market of the mobile phones.

All of it winds up bought by just three companies - Cabot Inc. of the United States, Germany's HC Starc and China's Nigncxia - the only firms with processing plants to turn coltan into the coveted tantalum powder. The largest companies who bought from those three processing plants are Sony, Compaq, Microsoft, Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nokia, Intel, Lucent, and Motorola.

The other natural resources like Gold and Diamonds ended up at Anglo-Ashanti Gold, Metalor, Anglo-American, De Beers, Barrick Gold, OM Group

Another system used was the nature parks which were specifically constructed to have control of the richest areas. Those nature parks were controlled by USAID, WWF, AWF, and Conservation International.

Further reading:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Africa/Congo_BehindNumbers.html

Post scriptum:
The War in Congo has been described as Africa's First World War. However the official story in the mass media always fails to mention Layer III and Layer IV who played a vital role in arming and funding the conflict. The War in Congo has produced between 3 million and 10 million deaths according to various sources. Given the immense amount of atrocities and the extend of American, European, and Asian interests, it is not an African war and should not be seen as such. It was a global war and the largest war since World War II. The only proper name is therefore World War III and the mass media have remained silent and actively stiffled the War For Mobile Phones.

[DrDebug]

11. China's Crude Conscience

The wildcard in the conflict is still Chevron which has been barred from Sudan in 1997 and want to return to take a piece of the Sudan's oil. Chevron is of course represented by Condi Rice. As a result the United States ambassador to Sudan denied the genocide on April 12, 2007:

Last month, Bush’s Special Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan Andrew Natsios told a group of Georgetown students that the “term genocide is counter to the facts of what is really occurring in Darfur.”

In a testy exchange with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday, Natsios defiantly refused to characterize the ongoing violence in Darfur as a genocide.

MENENDEZ: Do you consider the ongoing situation in Darfur a genocide, yes or no? <…>

NATSIOS: There is very little violence in Darfur right now.

MENENDEZ: I asked you to answer my question.

NATSIOS: I just answered your question.

MENENDEZ: Is the circumstances in Darfur today a continuing genocide? Yes or no?

NATSIOS: There is very little fighting between rebels and the government and very few civilian casualties going on in Darfur right now.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/12/natsios-no-genocide/

The main culprit in Darfur is China who is funding and arming the rebels for their oil company China National Petroleum Corp which currently control 40% of the Darfur oil.

Op-Ed: China's Crude Conscience
Ronan Farrow | The Wall Street Journal | August 10, 2006

EL FASHER, Sudan — In a squalid hut in Zam Zam refugee camp, 16-year-old Salim Adam swats flies from the livid scar where a bullet tore through his leg. Two years ago, Mr. Adam was farming with his father when the Janjaweed, a Sudanese government-backed militia who have executed a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, surrounded his village, firing rifles. "They grabbed my father. They demanded money and, when we had none, they shot him here" he says, smacking his palm against his forehead. Mr. Adam fled, gunfire at his back. Somehow, he dragged himself to a donkey. He cannot remember how long he rode across the desert before reaching Zam Zam.

The bullet that shattered Salim Adam's leg and the gun that fired it were almost certainly manufactured in China. The militiaman who pulled the trigger was likely compensated with revenues from Chinese oil purchases, which fund a majority of Khartoum's military actions. And the reason no help has come to Darfur is, in large part, because China has blocked every attempt to deploy a United Nations peacekeeping force. Though estimates vary, most data suggest that the death toll in Darfur has reached around 450,000, and is still rising.

By the time the world awakened to the slaughter here, China was already funneling money into Khartoum. Beijing's investments in Sudan now total around $4 billion. With a 40% stake each in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Co. and Petrodar, state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. owns the largest shares of both of Sudan's national oil consortia. And in 2005, Beijing purchased more than half of Sudan's oil exports. China now relies on Khartoum for about one-tenth of its massive oil needs, placing Sudan just behind Saudi Arabia and Iran as China's largest energy supplier by volume.

It is an unholy alliance. The U.N. imposed an arms embargo when it became apparent that the Government of Sudan's military actions in Darfur were overwhelmingly directed against helpless civilians. And yet China continues to supply Khartoum with assault helicopters, armored vehicles and small arms. Last August, Beijing sold 212 military trucks to Khartoum. Chinese oil company airstrips in southern Sudan have been used by government forces to conduct bombing raids on villages and hospitals. A U.N. investigation conducted this year determined that the vast majority of weaponry used to attack civilians across Darfur is of Chinese origin.

(...)

On May 16, the Security Council finally voted on a resolution that compelled Sudan to admit a U.N. peacekeeping assessment mission. China withdrew its veto threat only after the resolution had been gutted of key language that would have allowed some U.N. peacekeepers from a force already in southern Sudan to move to Darfur. And they did so with an explicit declaration from China's Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.N., Zhang Yishan, that their vote "should not be construed as a precedent for the Security Council's future discussion or the adoption of new resolutions against Sudan."

(...)

http://www.genocideintervention.net/about/press/coverage/index.php/archives/150

[DrDebug]

14. The Cold War over Oil aspect of the Darfur crisis

So how does the United States and Chevron fit into the Darfur crisis, because Chevron was blocked their access to the oil fields in 1997 by Bill Clinton.

The Cold War aspect behind the Civil War in Darfur.

Darfur: Forget genocide, there's oil
By F William Engdahl

(...)

Merchants of death
The United States, acting through surrogate allies in Chad and neighboring states has trained and armed the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army, headed until his death in July 2005 by John Garang, trained at the US Special Forces school at Fort Benning, Georgia. By pouring arms into first southeastern Sudan and since discovery of oil in Darfur into that region as well, Washington fueled the conflict that led to tens of thousands dying and several million driven to flee their homes. Eritrea hosts and supports the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the umbrella NDA opposition group, and the Eastern Front and Darfur rebels.

(...)

Much of the arms that have fueled the killing in Darfur and the south have been brought in via protected private "merchants of death" such as the notorious former KGB operative, now with offices in the US, Victor Bout, who has been cited repeatedly in recent years for selling weapons across Africa. US government officials strangely leave his operations in Texas and Florida untouched despite the fact he is on the Interpol wanted list for money laundering.

(...)

Chad oil and pipeline politics
Condoleezza Rice's Chevron is in neighboring Chad, together with the other US oil giant, ExxonMobil. They've just built a $3.7 billion oil pipeline carrying 160,000 barrels per day from Doba in central Chad, near Darfur, via Cameroon to Kribi on the Atlantic Ocean, destined for US refineries.

(...)

Supplied with US military aid, training and weapons, in 2004, Deby launched the initial strike that set off the conflict in Darfur. He used members of his elite Presidential Guard, who come from the province, providing them with all-terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to aid Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in southwestern Sudan. The US military support to Deby in fact had been the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum reacted and the ensuing debacle was unleashed in full, tragic force.

(...)

"West Africa's oil has become of national strategic interest to us," stated US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner back in 2002. Darfur and Chad are but an extension of the US Iraq policy "with other means" - control of oil everywhere. China is challenging that control "everywhere", especially in Africa. It amounts to a new undeclared Cold War over oil.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IE25Cb05.html

And add France, India, Canada and Malaysia to the mix of foreign interests with matching funding and arms shipments.

[Catfight]

12. And people believe there is a god. Please. We need a leader in this

world that will stand up to this affront on humanity. Three years now and nothing has changed? Talk about no hope. Who will help these people?

[KoKo]

15. It's so dreadful and it goes on and on. Many don't want to hear about it because...WHAT CAN WE DO?

We feel so helpless to help these women and the rest in Darfur. We can't even get our own Corrupt Govt to listen and yet the REST OF THE WORLD IS SILENT.

THE REST OF THE WORLD IS SILENT! WHAT DOES THAT SAY? :cry: