Opinion | When Gunmen Impose a Policy of Rape

Sudanese refugees who wade across a stream to enter Chad mostly say they leave because of starvation at home. But in tearful whispers, they add that something else is also driving both the starvation and the exodus: mass rape.

“There is so much rape,” Suad Urqud, a woman crossing from the Darfur region of Sudan with her malnourished daughter, told me. She recounted how an Arab militia called the Rapid Support Forces had publicly raped four women and girls, ages 15 to 20, in her village, to terrorize the community and force Black African ethnic groups to flee.

“Slaves, you have no place here,” she quoted them telling Black villagers like her, among many other racist epithets.

Suad’s daughter, Namarag, is 2 years old and suffering from acute malnutrition. Suad said that’s because the Arab militia has prevented members of her community from planting and harvesting crops.

If men go into the fields they are shot dead, Suad said. And if women do they are raped. So farmers cannot farm, and then their children starve.

Witness accounts suggest that the sexual violence isn’t just incidental in the chaos of conflict, but rather a deliberate policy of rape to terrorize Black African ethnic groups and drive them from Sudan. It is a revival of the mass murder and rape of the Darfur genocide of 20 years ago, and more than two million Sudanese have fled their country since it tumbled into civil war last year amid a new explosion of violence and accompanying famine.

Nearly every Sudanese refugee I spoke to on the Chad-Sudan border had witnessed rapes or knew people who had been raped. The victims have mostly been girls and young women, but it appears that men and boys also have been raped, with a similar aim of humiliating entire communities.

Many women described how the Rapid Support Forces had attacked their village and raped many of their neighbors while they themselves had somehow gotten away. The pain in their voices, the trembling of their hands and the tears in their eyes belied the accounts of miraculous escape.

One young mother who had just arrived from Sudan initially recounted how other villagers had been raped but she had been spared. After the interview, she stepped out of her hut and away from her sister and children to plead for help: She had in fact been raped six days earlier and feared a pregnancy.

She explained that she had carried her baby on her back because she thought this might be protective; the Rapid Support Forces often prefer to rape younger girls and virgins. But, she said, two gunmen in Rapid Support Forces uniforms caught her and threw the child on the ground, and then one raped her as her baby wailed. Afterward, she took the child and fled for Chad, but there is a culture of shame and silence around sexual violence and she has not even told her sister.

She confided in me only because she was desperate not to bear a rapist’s child and didn’t know how to find help. I took her to a local hospital, where a doctor was able to help her.

Rape is always devastating, but in Sudan it is also particularly stigmatizing. Of the four women who were publicly raped in Suad’s village, three were then divorced by their husbands; the other was single and will have difficulty marrying, Suad said.

One man, Isaak Abdulrahman, whom I met at the border as he arrived after his village had been attacked, wavered when I asked if he would ever allow his son to marry a woman who had been raped. His wife, Samira, piped up to say that she would never tolerate a family marriage to such a girl.

“It would be a shame for our family,” she explained.

Another complication: Some ethnic groups in Sudan practice an extreme form of female genital mutilation called infibulation, in which a young girl’s vulva is mostly sewn together with thread or a wild thorn, with an opening restored only upon marriage. The upshot is that if an unmarried girl is raped, the assault is particularly bloody.

There are now many armed groups in Sudan that have behaved deplorably, but refugees say that the Rapid Support Forces are disproportionately responsible for murder, torture and rape. The group is a descendant of the militias that committed genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, and its tactics haven’t much changed.

I covered the Darfur genocide on many reporting trips back then, and my impression is that 20 years later there are fewer massacres and a lower death toll from violence so far, but there may be more rapes, and certainly there is more starvation. There is also more global indifference.

The solution to mass starvation and mass rape isn’t just to provide more food and more doctors; above all, it’s to cut off the flow of weapons, force a peace deal and end the impunity for sexual violence. That would mean pressure on countries like the United Arab Emirates to stop arming the Rapid Support Forces, intelligence sharing to support prosecutions for crimes against humanity, and generally an approach by governments and the United Nations that punishes mass rape and recognizes its link to mass starvation. This is a question of our values but also of our interests: By some accounts, Sudan may be facing the world’s worst famine in decades, one that would lead to instability across the region, perhaps fragmentation and a failed state, and possibly huge refugee flows to Europe.

This coming week will be a test. As President Biden and other world leaders gather at the U.N. General Assembly, will they speak up forcefully — and not just call for a cease-fire but also name and shame countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, that (despite denials) have enabled the Rapid Support Forces’ campaign of murder and rape? Will they demand that countries like Egypt pressure their allies in the Sudanese Armed Forces to stop using starvation as a weapon of war?

Biden has provided substantial aid to Sudan and issued a statement a few days ago asserting that “the United States stands with the Sudanese people.” Great. But instead of holding the U.A.E. accountable, the Biden administration praises it as a “key partner” that works “to promote peace and security.” Really?

World leaders have a chance to elevate the catastrophe unfolding in Sudan at the United Nations in the coming days. They’ve averted their eyes for too long. Silence empowers the perpetrators and at some point becomes complicity.

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