2015-02-12 07:00
New York - Sudanese army troops raped at least 221 women and
girls in a Darfur village in a series of organised, house-to-house
attacks last year, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on
Wednesday.
The organisation's Africa director, Daniel Bekele, called it "a new low in the catalogue of atrocities in Darfur."
The
incident is at the heart of a recent plunge in relations between Sudan
and the international community over a region gripped by violent chaos
for more than a decade.
Reports of a mass rape in Tabit in late
October quickly surfaced via radio broadcasts by Sudanese overseas. A
joint UN-African Union peacekeeping mission at first said it found no
evidence, but the UN special representative on sexual violence in
conflict said a heavy Sudanese military presence during its visit likely
affected its findings.
The
Security Council demanded that Sudan allow a full investigation.
Instead, President Omar al-Bashir ordered the UN mission's human rights
office to close and has refused to allow the peacekeeping mission to
visit the village again.
Sudan's government says its own investigation found "there had not been a single case of rape."
But
the new report, based on more than 130 telephone interviews with
survivors, witnesses and army defectors, says girls as young as 10 were
raped by Sudanese forces, and that some women and girls were assaulted
multiple times and in front of their families.
The report says Human Rights Watch "documented 27 separate incidents of rape and obtained credible information about an additional 194 cases."
One
question is why it happened. Witnesses and survivors said army forces
ordered dozens of men to the outskirts of the village while soldiers
entered homes and accused residents of killing a soldier or helping
rebel groups, then raped the women and girls.
The report found no
evidence in the village of rebel forces, which have been fighting the
government since 2003 across the vast region of western Sudan. More than
300 000 have been killed in the conflict, and more than 400 000 fled
their homes last year alone.
Threatened
Witnesses
said some of the armed, uniformed soldiers in the mass rape were
stationed at the army base on the outskirts of town. Army defectors said
other troops were from bases near the North Darfur capital of El Fasher
and Sudan's capital, Khartoum.
"Multiple victims and witnesses
reported that government officials threatened to imprison or kill anyone
who spoke out about the attacks," Human Rights Watch said. Among those
making such threats was local commissioner Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdallah
Abdelrahman.
Movement in and out of Tabit is now restricted, with
new military checkpoints, and some survivors have said they avoided
medical treatment after the rapes because they feared more abuse.
The report says the military personnel who ordered, aided or participated in the rapes are responsible for war crimes.
Human
Rights Watch is demanding that Sudan allow immediate access to the
village, that the UN Security Council and the peacekeeping force take
"concrete steps" to protect civilians in Darfur and that the
International Criminal Court investigate.
The ICC prosecutor,
however, told the council in frustration late last year that she was
"hibernating" the existing case against Sudan because she was getting
little help from the council and the international community.
The
new report notes the recent UN discussions about shrinking the more than
20 000-strong peacekeeping mission and Sudan's recent insistence on an
"exit strategy," but it warns that "the withdrawal of peacekeepers could
undermine what little protection the mission has afforded the people of
Darfur."