Sex Slavery in Darfur

I was looking through magazines at work yesterday and found this article in glamour magazine. It concerns sex slavery in Darfur and how it severely impacted the lives of these women and their families. I thought it was worth reading, so please read this and comment with your reactions. -Katherine Amara

"We escaped sex slavery in Darfur"
What the women of this Darfuri tribe suffered at the hands of the region's notoriously brutal militia goes beyond anything you've read about before. Now, from the safety of a refugee camp, they tell their heartbreaking--and triumphant--story.

By Juliette Dominguez
The bad news from Darfur seems never-ending: pillaging, murder, rape as a tool of war.... But until now the people of this region in Sudan have spoken little, even among themselves, of an ongoing atrocity that haunts their lives: Untold numbers of women are being captured by the Arab Janjaweed militia and turned into sex slaves. Amnesty International and the United Nations have documented the sex slavery epidemic, yet their findings have gone virtually unnoticed by the American press.
The women you are about to meet were abducted and forced to serve as sex slaves four years ago. They are now living at the United Nations Djabal camp in Chad, and with this story they become the first Darfuri women to share their experiences in a magazine. They are brave to do so; in their tradition, if a woman admits to being raped, she is shunned by her entire community and risks the death penalty for adultery. For this reason, they asked to appear veiled in photos.
"We are talking now," one woman said, "because it is good that someone cares. Maybe some change will come of it--[and] this will be stopped."
By speaking out, these women are putting a human face on the epic disaster in Darfur. For more than a decade, this Texas-size area in the western part of Sudan has seen fighting between African farming communities and some Arab nomadic groups. Since 2003 Arab militias--Janjaweed, or "devils on horseback"--have been systematically attacking Darfuri villages, killing, raping and destroying homes and livestock, often with government troop support. The crisis has been called the first great genocide of the twenty-first century, claiming more than 400,000 lives and leaving millions in need of humanitarian assistance.
Sprawling refugee camps are the new home of more than 200,000 displaced Darfuris. Djabal camp is a brutal place--no one wants to be there, and every single person has a nightmare story of how they got to be there. Inside a straw hut with packed-dirt floors, a group of former sex slaves took turns recounting the day the Janjaweed rode into their lives and changed them forever.
Inhuman violence
First to speak was the matriarch of the group, Neye, 30. Her husband is the village chief of their Fur tribe. "Before the war," she said, "we were successful farmers, with camels, cows, sheep, a mill and plenty of land. We were wealthy enough to have hired field hands and servants for the house. It was a good life. But then one day the Janjaweed came. They killed people indiscriminately; it didn't matter whether you were young or old, a woman or a man. War doesn't choose. I couldn't see where my children or my husband were, if they were alive or dead. And then a Janjaweed found me and pulled me from my hiding place." She was taken hostage with many other women.
Sitting next to Neye was Toma, 25. Adjusting her bright yellow scarf to better cover her beautiful face, she told of being snatched during the same attack: "I was working in the fields with my two young boys, and with my baby boy strapped to my back," she recounted. "My husband was praying in the village mosque with the other men. Then I heard this noise, like thunder. We looked up and saw airplanes flying low over the village. They started shooting at us. I ran with my children to try and hide, but soon there were Janjaweed everywhere, rampaging through the village, burning down our houses and killing all the men and male children. They shot dead my two boys, and then shot the baby on my back. I couldn't find my husband--I assumed they'd shot him, too. The Janjaweed rounded up the women, including me, and ordered us to go with them. Anyone who resisted was shot."

Souraya, a confident 19-year-old dressed in a black robe, spoke next: "The Janjaweed were deliberate in selecting all the young and beautiful girls. I was 16 and a virgin. We were made to walk for days--along with a head of cattle they also stole--to their encampment."
"We were no more than animals to them," Toma elaborated. "They never talked to us. During the day we did domestic chores, and at night we were forced to have sex with them, sometimes as many as 10 Janjaweed in a row. They wouldn't let me sleep."
Escape and acceptance
Eventually all of the women from the village managed to escape--some in groups, some alone; some after days, some after months. "We were at the watering hole with the cattle, and we realized no one was guarding us," said Toma. "The Janjaweed were out attacking another village. So we ran. We hid in the trees at night, and walked during the day. It was many days before we arrived at a refugee camp where, to my joy, I found my husband. We cried and cried--we both thought the other was dead--and I told him everything. He accepted me back. We are trying to piece together our lives again."
Souraya, too, fled, only to find she was pregnant with a Janjaweed baby: "My life, as I had known it, was over," she told us. "But the past is the past. I now have a beautiful daughter." When asked about the future, she said she hoped to find a husband, though most of the men in her tribe were killed. "Maybe I will meet a man from another village who will accept what happened to me," Souraya said.
Compassion for the former sex slaves prevails within this tribe, in large part because of their chief, who welcomed them back with open arms. "My husband was devastated by what had happened, but accepted it because he loves me, and doesn't want me to suffer further," Neye said. "The chief wants me to help the other women who have suffered; we share our experiences and try to talk about our feelings. We may have lost all our possessions and our homeland, but we still have each other."

(Information from this post was found on the magazine's website.)