Johannesburg – Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, a side a civil war which has torn apart the African nation for over a year and created one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planetare accused of raping numerous women and girls and using some as sex slaves in a new one Human Rights Watch report. The New York-based human 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 outlines the findings of an investigation based on the cases of nearly 80 women and girls in a report released Monday, detailing horrific new allegations of abuse in Sudan, where both sides of the civil war have already been present. accused of war crimes.
Investigators gathered evidence on 79 women and girls between the ages of 7 and 50 who HRW said were raped, most of the incidents taking place at an RSF military base in Dibeibat, near the southern town of Habila from Kordofan.
Survivors and witnesses told the group that the men who carried out the attacks were either uniformed RSF forces or members of allied militias.
“Survivors described being gang-raped in front of their families and for extended periods of time, even while being held as sex slaves,” said Belkis Wille, HRW’s Associate Crisis and Conflict Director, who conduct many of the interviews with the survivors.
Ezzaddean Elsafi, a senior adviser to RSF, denied the allegations in the HRW report to CBS News, stating that “people wearing RSF uniforms” behind the alleged attacks were impersonators, not real RSF forces.
“RSF takes this very seriously and will investigate it. We are very sensitive to sexual violence against women and those responsible will be held accountable,” Elsafi said, denying the group has a significant presence in South Kordofan, while acknowledging that has forces “. in the area of Debibat”, near the border with North Kordofan state.
“This is absolutely misinformation,” he said of the HRW report.
HRW said it had shared a summary of the findings of its investigation with RSF commander-in-chief General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but had received no 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 really surprises me after learning these women and girls is the scope and scale” of crimes in Sudan.
CBS News has seen video of the full interview HRW conducted with an 18-year-old woman the group identified as Hania. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters broke into her home in Habila and took her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. He said they were taken in 10 vehicles to the Dibeibat military base.
Human Rights Watch
When they arrived, Hania said she recognized more than 30 girls from her town already there, with about 100 fighters holding them captive.
She said that when she tried to resist being raped, one of the militants “started beating me with a metal whip”. For the next three months, he said, “the fighters would come in groups of three every morning to take some girls to rape them, and then in the evening another group of three would come and take another group of girls to rape- them”.
Hania said the RSF men held her and the other women and girls in a type of animal pen constructed of wire and tree branches, where they were chained in groups of ten.
“What became clear from these cases is that in areas with controlled RSF, absolutely nowhere is safe, not if you run away, not even in your own home. Women and girls are at risk of being raped without matter where,” Wille told CBS News. .
Another woman, Hasina, 35, told HRW that six uniformed RSF men shot and killed her husband and stole all his livestock and money. She said the cows were her family’s investment, so with them and her money stolen, she felt she had no way to escape as many of her neighbors had, and she and her six young children, some just babies, they had no choice but to do it. stay at home
The RSF fighters returned three days later, he said, and “the three men raped me and left.”
Later that night, “three more came back and raped me again and told me to stay in my house.”
She said she was gang-raped almost every day for the next month before she fled.
Human Rights Watch
HRW met with Hasina at Camp Al-Hailu, a makeshift facility with little or no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.
“She is barely able to wake up and move on because of what she went through. Her children are now in a camp with little food and they looked very malnourished when I saw them… She is struggling to function as a mother ” he said. Wille added that the women who lived in tents next to Hasina helped take care of their 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 accountability to these women, they all looked at me blankly, as justice is a meaningless concept to them,” she said. “The scale of what is happening here means it has become normalized behavior by RSF. None of these women have ever heard of a soldier or fighter taking responsibility.”
Hania and a friend who was also pregnant managed to escape from their captors. They have been interviewed by HRW in the Nuba Mountains. They said 49 girls were still being held at the base and had also heard of girls being held at two other RSF bases.
“We have no way of knowing more about these women, as access is very difficult and dangerous, and in these areas there is no electricity, no mobile phone networks, so no information comes out. There is absolute silence about these abuse,” he added. Will said. “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 has been the largest on record for the second consecutive year in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian aid. It is estimated that about half of Sudan’s 50 million people suffer from severe hunger.
Last week, some 20 months into the war, fighting appeared to be intensifying, with both sides accusing the other of committing new atrocities. International efforts to negotiate a peace deal have stalled and there is no end in sight to the fighting.
