PROOF OF COLLUSION
Joffe-Walt, Benjamin
Proof of Collusion The Government of Sudan Can't Hide the Evidence By Benjamin Joffe-Walt Photograph by Alexia Webster At first, the women tried to hide. They headed to a lake and submerged...
...Baxit Zaruuk was abducted this summer from the village of Mokjar by Sudanese soldiers and members of the Janjaweed, the armed militias that have been marauding around the country...
...They were transported by plane at night to Khartoum and divided up among soldiers as domestic workers and, in some cases, wives...
...The rebel next to him stares down...
...They deny it and don't stop what they are doing...
...We take a plane ride to Nyala, where a Nigerian observer announces, "We caught them fighting together red-handed, referring to the Sudanese army working alongside the Janjaweed militias as they inflicted horrors at a large refugee camp...
...They headed to a lake and submerged themselves as the Sudanese army approached...
...They stood in parade and there was saluting...
...They put us all on two planes, each with about a hundred soldiers...
...They tried to take me into a truck, and I refused, so one of them hit me hard with a cane, broke my rib, then threw me in the truck," she says...
...The Sudanese government is lying all the time...
...The government soldiers were gloating...
...Steyn's forces confirmed more than fifty civilian deaths in one week alone...
...You look at this stuff, and it makes you turn dead white...
...They took forty-three of us in Land Cruisers and drove us two days without food or water...
...There are so many clear ceasefire violations by the Sudanese government...
...The international observers from the African Union cannot directly intervene in the conflict, and various governments and human rights groups have called for the mandate and size of the observer force to be expanded to protect civilians...
...In traditional peacekeeping, there is a line, says South African commander Barry Steyn...
...Hamis herself resisted...
...She presses her fingers into her hands and looks down a bit as she narrates, slowly...
...Each woman was given to a soldier," Benjamin Joffe-Walt is a freelance writer based in South Africa...
...But they couldn't stay there forever...
...I thought they'd kill me...
...Like Hamis, Zaruuk, too, was taken to the airport...
...You believe there's an inherent goodness in people, but you see some of these villages, and it shakes that belief, he says, as he describes the maggot-infested decomposing skulls he had found...
...It takes quite a bit of coordination to kidnap forty women from rural Darfur and fly them all secretly to Khartoum for forced marriage, so this was clearly agreed upon by senior politicians, says the defecting parliamentarian, speaking on condition of anonymity...
...We are all friends, the Sudanese representative says with a sleazy smile during a helicopter ride...
...There were twenty-five girls from many different areas...
...The troops from the African Union that are supposed to be guaranteeing a ceasefire— with the goal of stopping these human rights abuses—are at a loss to do so...
...The tension is overt...
...Bleeding and with broken ribs, they sat on the plane in silence, having no idea where they were going or what awaited them...
...Rape and mass murder by Jan-jaweed militias in Darfur has been well documented, but mass abduction is too complicated for a militia...
...In Khartoum, we were all taken to a place along the Nile and raped at gunpoint...
...Each observer team includes representatives of the Sudanese government and rebel movements...
...What can they do...
...There are no lines and borders here, and we don't directly intervene, so it's a very difficult mission...
...The discovery of the women's cases is damning evidence against the government's claim of noninvolvement in the organized violence against black Africans in Darfur...
...Aside from a small protection force, there are absolutely no arms here, says William Molokwane, an intelligence officer...
...If something happens now, what can we do...
...she says...
...They never let me out, and for two months I didn't see outside...
...They're not acting in good faith, says Chief Military Observer Colonel Anthony Amedoh, referring to Sudanese officials...
...When we arrived at a base in Khartoum the soldiers saluted their commanders, and they were each given money, she says...
...Hamis says she saw all the soldiers bowing to a portly commander with gold on his shoulders inspecting the women...
...They kept speaking as if they were proud of what they did, she says...
...we can just report it...
...One woman refused, and they split her head into many pieces with an ax in front of all of us...
...We reached a place in the middle of the night with lights, and they put us directly on a huge airplane, she recalls...
...It is solid proof of collusion between the government, army, and judiciary in the rape, abduction, and slavery of children and women...
...We were chased, and all the women were caught, each raped by three to six men," says Bokur Hamis, the pseudonym of a twenty-one-year-old woman from Jartage, a village in western Darfur...
...A fourteen-year-old girl, she hesitantly tells her story...
...I traveled along with a 120-strong force from Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Senegal, and Egypt...
...The soldiers and Janjaweed came into the village and threatened to kill us if we didn't go with them, says Zaruuk, also a pseudonym...
...The car didn't stop, so we couldn't run away...
...But the international troops were powerless to stop it...
...I was given to an Arab soldier, taken to his house, and locked inside...
...Given the questionable results of the so-called ceasefire army of the African Union, there is growing resentment among the people ofDarfur...
...But we can't stop them...
...Everyone must sign each investigative report so we have to water down everything because we have warring parties on teams, says Steyn...
...People here hate the AU," says Gamar, a local trader...
...If either side crosses that line, the peacekeeper fights back...
...Now I don't know where any of them are...
...The army captured many children and women hiding in the bush outside burnt villages, explains a senior politician in Khartoum...
Vol. 68 • December 2004 • No. 12
