Sudan Militiamen Use Rape As Weapon

Avatar for mrsed4
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-22-2003
Sudan Militiamen Use Rape As Weapon
34
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 12:21pm
If Bush thought Iraq needed our attention, why is he virtually ignoring the atrocities in Africa, such as those reported in today's AP story "Group: Sudan Militiamen Use Rape As Weapon"?

<

Powell said Friday that he expects to hear from U.S. experts next week on whether Sudan officials should be charged with genocide.>>

In other words, they've "taken it under advisement"...The genocide and ethnic cleansing that has been going on in Africa for all these years has gone unanswered by the US, while oil interests in Iraq have been well protected.

I guess we've already exhausted all of our military power in Iraq, so we have to tell those women and children that they just have to "lay back and enjoy" the rapes, right? I guess these victims should have been sitting on oil fields, how stupid of them.

Group: Sudan Militiamen Use Rape As Weapon

Mon Jul 19, 8:38 AM ET

By RODRIQUE NGOWI, Associated Press Writer

NAIROBI, Kenya - Sudanese Arab militiamen rape women and girls as young as eight in the violent campaign intended to hurt, humiliate and drive out black Africans from the troubled region of Darfur, a human rights organization said Monday.

The Sudanese Janjaweed Arab militiamen sometimes torture and break limbs of women to prevent them from escaping rape, abductions and sexual slavery, Amnesty International said in the report titled: "Sudan, Rape as a weapon of war in Darfur."

Thousands have been killed and more than a million black Africans have fled their homes in the face of attacks by the government-backed Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, or "horsemen" in the local dialect.

The Janjaweed "are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish," a 37-year-old victim, identified only as A., says in the report.

Sudan on Saturday ordered that committees of women judges, police officers and legal consultants investigate rape accusations and help victims through criminal cases in the Iraq (news - web sites)-sized Darfur region.

The Arab militiamen routinely kill black African men in the western region and target women and girls for sexual violence, Amnesty International said, citing hundreds of interviews human rights workers conducted in camps sheltering people who fled the atrocities in Darfur.

"Women and girls are being attacked, not only to dehumanize the women themselves but also to humiliate, punish, control, inflict fear and displace women and to persecute the community to which they belong," the London-based group said.

"In many cases the Janjaweed have raped women in public, in the open air, in front of their husbands, relatives or the wider community," the group said. "The suffering and abuse endured by these women goes far beyond the actual rape ... survivors now face a lifetime of stigma and marginalisation from their own families and communities."

Women in Darfur who have undergone female genital mutilation are at an even greater risk of injury and face higher risks of infection by HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS (news - web sites) and other sexually transmitted diseases, the rights group said.

Darfur's troubles stem from long-standing tensions between nomadic Arab tribes and their African farming neighbors over dwindling water and agricultural land. Those tensions exploded into violence in February 2003 when two African rebel groups took up arms over what they regard as unjust treatment by the government in their struggle with Arab countrymen.

Aid workers and refugees accuse the government of arming and providing air support to the Janjaweed, who have torched hundreds of villages in a campaign equated with ethnic cleansing. The government denies any involvement in the militia attacks.

There are also reports that the Sudanese government is integrating members of the Jajaweed into army and police units deployed around Darfur, said Erwin Van der Borght, Amnesty International's deputy head of the Africa program.

The United Nations (news - web sites) estimates up to 30,000 people have been killed in Darfur, but some analysts put the figure much higher. The death toll could surge to more than 350,000 if aid doesn't reach more than 2 million people soon, the U.S. Agency for International Development has warned.

Pressure has mounted on Sudan to end the slaughter. The latest peace talks ended prematurely Saturday after rebels walked out saying the Sudanese government must first disarm the Janjaweed.

The rebels were also seeking government commitments to allow an international inquiry into the killings, prosecute those responsible, lift restrictions on aid workers and release prisoners of war.

The peace talks began after a concerted diplomatic push by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites), who visited the region earlier this month.

Powell said Friday that he expects to hear from U.S. experts next week on whether Sudan officials should be charged with genocide.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=535&ncid=535&e=10&u=/ap/20040719/ap_on_re_af/darfur_rape_as_weapon_3

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iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Mon, 07-19-2004 - 9:04pm

Thanks for posting this article. I've tried to get a thread going on this subject to no avail.


In

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 12:22am

Maybe this will persuade the UNSC to expand the scope of their sanctions...if France

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-30-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 1:13am
I've got an idea.

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Since the U.S. doesn't even have enough troops in Afaghanistan and Iraq to really fight the war the way we should in those countries and properly secure those countries, let's get involved in another war in the Sudan. Maybe we can get a few thousand more American troops killed there, and spend billions more of our hardworking taxpayers dollars.!

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And after that we can go to Iran, and Syria, and God knows where else and have some wars there.

Hey, not a problem, the American citizens don't mind. We don't mind spending countless , endless amounts of money to kill all the bad guys of the world, and get thousands of our guys killed doing it. Not a problem, no one in America will object.

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The Arab Muslims in the Sudan are animals, and that's an insult to the animals. They are genocidal pieces of crap. Just the fact they are breathing is an insult to humanity.

But it's not our war.

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Most of the Muslim countries in the world are filled with genocidal hate. The Muslims are killing each other and anyone else they can in numerous countries from Thailand to India to Nigeria to the Sudan. But we can't have wars in dozens of countries killing bad guys, we would go broke trying, not to mention all of our soliders who would die.

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Let's try and finish the wars in Afighanistan and Iraq before we consider going anywhere else. Our troops are spread thin as it is. Money doesn't grow on trees, and we have an 8 trillion dollar federal debt as it is. And I can assure you, the American people can barely tolerate the nearly one thousand men we have lost already in Iraq and Afaghanistan, much less thousands more in the Sudan.

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There is only one way to really get rid of all the evil Muslims in the world and their genocidal rage against the "infidels", and that is to nuke most of the Muslim war zones in the world, which I assume we won't do, (at least not yet). Let's take care of the wars we got already.

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And just to play it safe, just for good measure, end Muslim immigration to America.

Edited 7/20/2004 1:16 am ET ET by bayareajay


Edited 7/20/2004 1:25 am ET ET by bayareajay

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 1:23am




Mark Steyne explains it as only he can:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/07/20/do2002.xml


The point is that today's humanitarians are too busy for Sudan. Ask Barbra Streisand and she'd say, "Sudan Hussein? Bush lied!!!" As for Kipling, if he were around today, he'd be tied up with the big Not In Our Name march with fellow versifiers Harold Pinter and Andrew Motion. Or possibly he'd be preening with Ashley Judd and Rupert Everett and other experts at the big world Aids conference in Bangkok, and getting his photo taken next to an effigy of George W Bush smeared with blood. America spends more money combating Aids than the rest of the world combined, but why let some petty number-crunching spoil your fun?


Darling Rupert denounced Bush's Aids plan for Africa as "extremely frightening" because of its "judgmental attitude" toward sex. Kofi Annan was also critical of Bush's initiative, mainly because all those billions of dollars are being spent directly by America in Africa, rather than being sluiced through the UN.


Now that the Oil-for-Fraud programme has come to an end, many UN bureaucrats are at a loose end and would have been only too happy to bring their experience and efficiency to bear on Bush's pathetically pitifully footling judgmental $15 billion. Once the UN's administration fee had been deducted, there could easily have been enough left over to buy 20 thousand bucks' worth of condoms, no doubt from a rubber factory co-owned by the husband of an old mistress of Jacques Chirac's.


The Americans could probably make a difference in Sudan, too. The USAF could target and bomb the Janjaweed as effectively as they did the Taliban. But then John Mann and Harold Pinter and Rupert Everett would get their knickers in a twist, and everyone from John Kerry to Polly Toynbee would complain that it's "illegitimate" unless it's authorised by the UN. The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead.


The UN system is broken beyond repair. In May, even as its proxies were getting stuck into their ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan was elected to a three-year term on the UN Human Rights Commission. This isn't an aberration: Zimbabwe is also a member. The very structure of the organisation, under which countries vote in regional blocs, encourages such affronts to decency.


The Sudanese representative, by the way, immediately professed himself concerned by human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.


The UN, as the Canadian columnist George Jonas put it, enables dictators to punch above their weight. All that Elfatih Mohammed Ahmed Erwa, the Sudanese government's man in New York, has to do is string things out long enough to bog down the US call for sanctions in the Gauloise-filled rooms. "Let's not be hasty," Erwa told the Los Angeles Times. And, fortunately, not being hasty is something the UN is happy to do in its own leisurely way until everyone is in the mass grave and the point is moot.


Today, British charities are launching a campaign to save Darfur, which they describe as the "world's worst humanitarian crisis". If we were serious about the plight of Sudan, we'd stop using that dully evasive word "humanitarian". It's fine for a hurricane or a drought, but not a genocide.


The death and dislocation in Sudan is a political crisis every step up the chain - from the blood-drenched militia to their patrons in Khartoum to their buddies in the African Union to the schemers and cynics at the UN. It's "multilateralism" that magnifies some nickel 'n' dime murder gangs into a global player.


In W. F. Deedes's account yesterday, I was struck by this line: "Aid agencies have found it difficult to get visas." That sentence encapsulates everything that is wrong with the transnational approach. The UN confers on its most dysfunctional members a surreal, post-modern sovereignty: a state that claims it can't do anything about groups committing genocide across huge tracts of its territory nevertheless expects the world to respect its immigration paperwork as inviolable.


Why should the West's ability to help Darfur be dependent on the visa section of the Sudanese embassy? The world would be a better place if the UN, or the democratic members thereof, declared that thug states forfeit the automatic deference to sovereignty. Since that won't happen, it would be preferable if free nations had a forum of their own in which decisions could be reached before every peasant has been hacked to death. The Coalition of the Willing has a nice ring to it.


One day, historians will wonder why the most militarily advanced nations could do nothing to halt men with machetes and a few rusting rifles. After Kitchener's victory over the dervishes at Omdurman, Belloc wrote:


"Whatever happens/ We have got/ The Maxim gun/ and they have not."


We've tossed out the Maxim gun for daisycutters and cruise missiles. In Darfur, meanwhile, the Janjaweed on their horses are no better armed than the dervishes were. But we're powerless against them because we've fetishised poseur-multilateralism as the only legitimate form of intervention. Who needs a "Kipling of today" when the old one works perfectly well:


"Take up the White Man's burden/ The savage wars of peace/ Fill full the mouth of famine /And bid the sickness cease;/ And when your goal is nearest/ The end for others sought,/ Watch Sloth and heathen Folly/ Bring all your hope to nought."


He didn't know the half of it. Today, we have devised a system of protean "world government" that amplifies both the Sloth of the West and the heathen Folly of the thug states. And, because of it, in Sudan as in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands will die.




Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-30-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 2:03am
Whren,

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Where are we going to get all the money for all of these wars? We are trillions in debt already and the baby boomers are retiring begining in a few years. Are you willing to suggest to the American people we should spend huge amounts in new taxes, and lose thousands more of our men? Do you think we are God, that money grows on trees?

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And what's with this White men's burden business? That went out with colonialism! The more wars we go into , the more the world hates us and wants to kill us!

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Don't get me wrong, I respect your ideals at wanting to stop genocide, but even powerful countries like the U.S. has it's limits.

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Other parts of the world need to learn to be responsible for themselves and stop their own genocides. The U.S. cannot police the world and be involved in one war after another. That isn't fair to us, we didn't create the mess in the Sudan. If the genocide is to be stopped there, the Africans themselves and other countries will have to be responsible for stopping it.
Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 2:21am
To All,

This is important!

As Mrsed4 posted, genocide is taking place right now in the Darfur region of Sudan. We shouldn’t allow this to become another Rwanda, where ten years later we wonder how the international community could have let genocide take place there.

Please consider clicking below to send a fax to Congress asking them to vote for the bi-partisan House and Senate Resolutions demanding that the US take action to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Here is some info about this organization, but you don’t have to join in order to send the fax:

FaithfulAmerica is an online community for people of faith who want

to build a more just and compassionate nation.

It is a new voice that rejects both the fundamentalism of the right and

the secularism of the left. It is a community for people whose faith inspires

them to alleviate human suffering rather than to cast the first stone.

FaithfulAmerica decries a go-it-alone culture that has reduced our

politics to selfishness and fear. Drawing on America's founding values and

the profound social justice message at the heart of every major religion,

FaithfulAmerica will meet this challenge by promoting human equality

and dignity, peace and inclusion, stewardship of the earth, and honest political

and religious debate.

FaithfulAmerica provides one-click opportunities to impact current

political issues and shift the terms of public debate.

It aspires to be an online wing of a powerful, new progressive faith movement,

like the ones that fought for independence, abolition and civil rights.

Join FaithfulAmerica.org today, and together we can build a more just

and compassionate nation:

http://www.faithfulamerica.org

In Darfur, Sudan, 1,000 people are dying every day, and that number is rising. Over one million black Africans have been bombed and burnt out of their villages, and their crops and water supplies destroyed by Arab "Janjaweed" militias. The Government-backed Janjaweed surround the refugee camps and block life-giving food and medicine getting through. Anyone leaving is raped or killed.

The US Government estimates that 370,000 human beings are already dead or certain to die of starvation in these extermination camps. Up to 1 million could die within the next few months.

As people of faith and members of the human family, we cannot let this horror continue. Our government's response so far has been slow and weak. Only an immediate international humanitarian intervention to protect the people of Darfur and ensure aid gets to them will stop the slaughter. Click below to send a fax to Congress telling them to vote for the bi-partisan House and Senate Resolutions demanding the US take these actions to stop the genocide in Darfur:

www.faithfulamerica.org/darfur.htm

We must act now. The people of Darfur need a miracle, and are praying for it. We must ask ourselves whether we are the instruments through which that miracle can happen.

www.faithfulamerica.org/darfur.htm

The faith community has mobilized to address this moral outrage. Daily, peaceful protests at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington DC have echoed protest tactics used against Apartheid in South Africa. Religious leaders, celebrities and political leaders are being arrested each day in acts of civil disobedience, including Reverend Bob Edgar, Congressman Charlie Rangel, and actor Danny Glover.

Blessings,

The FaithfulAmerica.org Team

For more information on the crisis in Darfur, or to get involved in activism in your community, please visit www.darfurgenocide.org


Thanks.

C

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 9:01am
I must commend and applaud your enthusiasm on always finding a way to get rid of "muslims" in the U.S. The way you are saying it is that Muslims are to blame for all the woes in the United States. If the U.S. stops immigration totally from Muslim countries, who then will we blame when something goes wrong? Who will own the new 7-11 I want at the corner of my streeet? Who will I pay to drive me to the airport or in downtown Chicago when the temperature is -10 and snow on the ground?

You hardly ever hear of a muslim murdering someone in the U.S. You hardly ever hear of a muslim robbing or raping someone. Most muslims tend to stay to themselves, pray in the mosque, and spend quite alot of money to help the economy.

So lets go along with your idea on stopping immigration from muslim countries. What are we left with? A bunch of uneducated, unskilled Americans that have nothing better to do then to do senseless crimes, murders, and rapes. Is the an amicable solution for you? The muslims are not the problem in the U.S. my friend. The U.S. murder rate is one of the highest in the world, but yet according to you letting Muslims come into the U.S. is the real threat.

Instead of trying to stop Muslims from coming in, why dont we try to get the useless, drugged up, murdering Americans out. I am pretty confident that when that happens, the U.S. will have a much better attitude. It is a shame to be spending all this time blaming the Muslims, when it is as clear to see as the sky is, that muslims are NOT the problem. Tell you what, I will take all the Muslims as my neighbors, and you can have all the drug dealing, gun-toting, crack head gangsters ok? I am not speaking of a certain race or color either, so no one even bring that up.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-30-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 12:08pm
I'm very conservative on law and order issues. But the thug selling drugs, or the gangster killing other gangsters in the inner city isn't trying to kill us by the millions. The Muslim terrorists are.

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Because our immigration service is underfunded and understaffed we let in immigrants without really checking into them and we don't control the borders. The Muslim terrorists who murdered thousands on 9/11 and cost our economy billions of dollars, were a result of our ridiculously lax immigration policy.

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I sometimes use cabs and I won't ride with Muslim cab drivers, I have another cab service I use. I have found that the Muslim cab drivers usually get lost, either they don't know where they are going, or they pretend they don't know so they can take you out of the way to get a larger cab rate. Also Muslim cab drivers are very rude to female business travelers, there has been a real problem with that in America, many of the Muslim cab drivers believe these women should be at home, not out in the business world doing "men's" work. I wouldn't subject my wife or any other female I know to a Muslim cab driver.

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Thankfully there are plenty of non-Muslim cab drivers that I can use in the cities where I go.

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I don't go to little Muslim owned corner stores. They are a rip off, they charge too much. I go to ordinary American stores.

Edited 7/20/2004 12:14 pm ET ET by bayareajay


Edited 7/20/2004 12:16 pm ET ET by bayareajay

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2004
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 12:27pm
Yup your rite Jay, all Muslims trying to get into this country are terrorists. My mistake.





Fortunately people are becoming more aware of your way of thinking. It is paranoid and quite frankly sounding like the time up until the civil rights movement.



Paranoia at work here Jay? Quite honestly I know alot of muslims that came here and are American citizens or almost a citizen. I do not know of any of them who think that way, because they themselves have wives that work outside of the home. They dont view these women as anything but money to bring home to their own families. Of course there are those rare instances that you have claimed, but not a majority and definately a very very small minority. Personally, my cab rides are usually free because I am a muslim but that is a whole different story. :-)

As I stated before, it is so refreshing to see that you feel Muslims are the evil. while you concentrate on them, remember your immediate threat is probably right down the street, not in another country. Those inner-city thugs are moving more out to the suburbs every day.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tue, 07-20-2004 - 12:39pm
<<"In other words, they've "taken it under advisement"...The genocide and ethnic cleansing that has been going on in Africa for all these years has gone unanswered by the US, while oil interests in Iraq have been well protected.">>.....

NB : Clinton interview (promoting his book) on BBC June 22nd 2004: In Rwanda, it, as I say over and over again, it’s one of my greatest regrets. But we look at it backwards and say, well I had to know that seven or eight hundred thousand people could be killed with machetes in ninety days, and as far as I know, there’s no precedent for that in the history of the world.


DIMBLEBY:

Djie

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