A Policy of Rape

NY Times ^ | June 5, 2005 | NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

[neverdem]

All countries have rapes, of course. But here in the refugee shantytowns of Darfur, the horrific stories that young women whisper are not of random criminality but of a systematic campaign of rape to terrorize civilians and drive them from "Arab lands" - a policy of rape.

One measure of the international community's hypocrisy is that the world is barely bothering to protest. More than two years after the genocide in Darfur began, the women of Kalma Camp - a teeming squatter's camp of 110,000 people driven from their burned villages - still face the risk of gang rape every single day as they go out looking for firewood.

Nemat, a 21-year-old, told me that she left the camp with three friends to get firewood to cook with. In the early afternoon a group of men in uniforms caught and gang-raped her.

"They said, 'You are black people. We want to wipe you out,' " Nemat recalled. After the attack, Nemat was too injured to walk, but her relatives found her and carried her back to camp on a donkey.

A neighbor, Toma, 34, said she heard similar comments from seven men in police uniforms who raped her. "They said, 'We want to finish you people off,' " she recalled.

Sometimes the women simply vanish. A young mother named Asha cried as she told how she and her four sisters were chased down by a Janjaweed militia; she escaped but all her sisters were caught.

"To this day, I don't know if they are alive or dead," she sobbed. Then she acknowledged that she had another reason for grief: a Janjaweed militia had also murdered her husband 23 days earlier.

Gang rape is terrifying anywhere, but particularly so here. Women who are raped here are often ostracized for life, even...

[Nov3]

They never specifically mention the word Muslim in a bad context - it is pretty much policy at the times. Now if it had been Jews or Christians . . . . .

[Petronski]

Whether the old gray whore recognizes it or not, this narrative is a great argument for personal firearms and against gun control.

How many times would these poor women be raped if they could blast two rounds into the perp and have four more left for the gang?

We ought to defund the UN and spend the money on Saturday Night Specials and training for these women. Let the creepy misogynist racists and Muslims wail...in pain from bleeding-gut gunshot wounds.

[neverdem]

The raghead muslim militia is raping the Black Christians and not a word about religion. At least they said Arab.

That's the war in southern Sudan that's been going on for about twenty years against Christians and animists. In Darfur, it's Islamic Arabs committing genocide against Islamic Africans. Remember, it's The Religion Of Peace(TROP).

[Nov3]

In the area the blacks are Christian and arabs muslim - in general. There are black Muslims of course. The Janjaweed are Muslim. I have read a great deal on the area and have never heard about internecine Muslim war but it wouldn't surprise me

[neverdem]

I've read about it in a number of stories in the NT Times and Washington Post. The Africans being raped and killed have the usual Islamic names, i.e. Abdullah, Mohammed, etc. Arab herders want the water and land resources of the African farmers. This is nothing less than racist genocide of fellow believers by Arabs against Black Africans.

It's Moslem against Moslem in Darfur, and we are blowing it as far as exploiting The Religion Of Peace (TROP) hypocrisy! We should be broadcasting this story all over Africa and the rest of Islam as far as Indonesia and the Philippines as well as the Americas.