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07/29/2004 Archived Entry: "'We Want to Make a Light Baby'"

Posted by steve @ 04:04 PM EST [Link]

RAPE AS A WEAPON: (Via Brothers Judd Blog) It's good to know that the Western press is finally getting off their duffs and reporting the carnage in Sudan's Darfur region. I guess when it's black people getting killed (or Muslims killing Muslims), it's not as newsworthy (or too hot button).

The Washington Post reports today that one of the weapons that the Arab Janjaweed militia is using against the Sudanese in Darfur is rape.

At first light on Sunday, three young women walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur. They had gone out to collect straw for their family's donkeys. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid," meaning "black" and "slave." Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said.

"They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, 'Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,' " said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. "They said, 'You get out of this area and leave the child when it's made.' "

Suliman's father, a tall, proud man dressed in a flowing white robe, cried as she described the rape. It was not an isolated incident, according to human rights officials and aid workers in this region of western Sudan, where 1.2 million Africans have been driven from their lands by government-backed Arab militias, tribal fighters known as Janjaweed.

Interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Janjaweed were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child's ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.

It's a shame that the Janjaweed is unlikely to taste Western steel. I hear that in many cultures, the death of a person is attached to the velocity of a steel-jacketed round.

Read on.

Replies: 1 Comment

The weapon is not rape. It's progeny.

Posted by Jorge @ 07/30/2004 03:38 AM EST