Johannesburg — Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, one side in one civil war That has torn the African nation apart for over a year and made one of the… worst humanitarian crises on earthare accused in a new report by Human Rights Watch of raping dozens of women and girls and using some as sex slaves. The New York-based rights group says the use of sexual violence by paramilitary forces in South Kordofan state since September 2023 constitutes war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
HRW detailed the findings of a study based on the cases of nearly 80 women and girls in a report published Monday detailing horrific new allegations of abuse in Sudan, where both sides of the civil war were already involved. accused of war crimes.
Researchers collected evidence on 79 women and girls between the ages of 7 and 50 who HRW said had been raped. Most of the incidents took place at an RSF military base in Dibeibat, near the town of Habila in South Kordofan.
Survivors and witnesses told the group that the men who carried out the attacks were all uniformed RSF troops or members of allied militias.
“Survivors described being gang raped in the presence of their families and for extended periods of time, including while held as sex slaves,” said Belkis Wille, HRW’s Associate Crisis and Conflict Director, who conducted many of the interviews with the survivors. decreased.
Ezzaddean Elsafi, a senior RSF adviser, denied the allegations in the HRW report to CBS News, claiming that “people wearing RSF uniforms” behind the alleged attacks were impersonators, and not real RSF troops.
“RSF takes this very seriously and will investigate. We are very sensitive to sexual violence against women and the perpetrators will be held accountable,” said Elsafi, who denied that the group even has a significant presence in South Kordofan but acknowledged that it has forces. in the Debibat area”, near the border with the state of North Kordofan.
“This is absolutely disinformation,” he said of the HRW report.
HRW said it had shared a summary of the findings of its investigation with the RSF’s overall commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but had not received a response.
Wille has spent years documenting sexual violence in conflicts around the world, including by ISIS militants against Yazidi women in Iraq, but she told CBS News: “What is really astonishing to me after meeting these women and girls is the scope and extent” of crimes in Sudan.
CBS News has seen video of HRW’s full interview with an 18-year-old woman the group identified as Hania. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters stormed her home in Habila and seized her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. She said they were taken to the military base in Dibeibat in 10 vehicles.
Human Rights Watch
When they arrived, Hania said she already recognized more than thirty other girls from her town there, while about a hundred fighters held them captive.
She said that when she tried to resist rape, one of the militants “started hitting me with a metal whip.” Over the next three months, she said, “The fighters came every morning in groups of three to take a few girls to rape them, and in the evening another group of three came to take another set of girls to rape them.”
Hania said the RSF men held her and the other women and girls in a kind of animal cage made of wire and tree branches, where they were chained in groups of ten.
“What became clear from these cases is that in areas under RSF control, absolutely nowhere is safe – not when you flee, or even in your home. Women and girls are at risk of being raped wherever they are,” Wille told CBS News. .
Another woman, Hasina, 35, told HRW that six uniformed RSF men shot dead her husband and stole all their livestock and money. She said the cows were her family’s investment, so now that they and her money had been stolen, she felt she had no means to flee as many of her neighbors had done. stay in their house.
The RSF fighters returned three days later, she said, and “all three men raped me and left.”
Later that evening, “three more came back, raped me again and told me to stay in my house.”
She said she was raped almost every day for the next month before fleeing.
Human Rights Watch
HRW met Hasina at Camp Al-Hailu, a makeshift facility with little to no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.
“She can barely wake up and carry on because of what she’s been through. Her children are now in a camp with little food and they looked very malnourished when I saw them. … She has trouble functioning as a mother,” she said. Wille, adding that women living in tents next to Hasina helped care for her children.
Wille said there was no psychological support for traumatized women in the camp or in much of the country.
“When I raised the issue of justice and responsibility to these women, they all looked at me blankly because justice is a meaningless concept to them,” she said. ‘The scale on which it is happening here means that it has become normalized behavior by the RSF. None of these women have ever heard of a soldier or warrior ever being held accountable.”
Hania and a friend who was also pregnant managed to escape from their captors. They were interviewed by HRW in the Nuba Mountains. They said 49 girls were still being held at the base and she had heard that girls were also being held at two other RSF bases.
“There is no way for us to find out more about these women because access is very difficult and dangerous, and in these areas there is no electricity, no mobile phone networks, so no information gets out. There is an absolute silence about these abuses.” said Wille. “We will probably never know what happened to these women and girls.”
The charity International Rescue Committee says the humanitarian crisis caused by Sudan’s civil war will be the largest on record for the second year in a row in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. It is estimated that roughly half of Sudan’s population of 50 million suffers from severe hunger.
Last week, some 20 months after the war began, fighting appeared to intensify, with each side accusing the other of committing new atrocities. International efforts to reach a peace deal have stalled and there is no end in sight to the fighting.
