Rape is rampant in Sudan’s civil war, a United Nations investigation said Tuesday, accusing paramilitaries in particular of carrying out sexual violence on a “shocking” scale.
Children are also not spared from abuse, with women and girls being abducted for sexual slavery, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission to Sudan said in a new report.
“There is no longer any safe place in Sudan,” said Mohammed Chande Othman, chairman of the investigation.
Since April 2023, there has been a war between the Sudanese Army (SAF) under the country’s de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
This has led to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. More than 25 million people – more than half the population – are facing severe hunger.
– War crimes –
The mission concluded that the SAF, RSF and their allied militias had “committed massive human rights and international humanitarian law violations, many of which may amount to war crimes and/or crimes against humanity”.
The mission said both sides were engaged in torture amounting to war crimes and were hindering access to humanitarian assistance.
The report accused both sides of sexual violence, but said that RSF was behind the majority of documented cases.
The mission said the RSF was responsible for “widespread sexual violence”, including “mass rape and kidnapping of victims and detaining them in sexual slavery-like conditions”.
It also said the RSF and its allies were involved in “abduction, and the recruitment and use of children in hostilities” amid systematic looting and plundering.
– Rape, Terror and Punishment –
Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, said, “The scale of sexual violence we have documented in Sudan is shocking.”
The mission said such abuses were “part of a pattern aimed at terrorizing and punishing civilians for alleged associations with adversaries” and suppressing any opposition to their military advances.
In the Western Darfur region, sexual violence was committed “with particular brutality, with firearms, knives and whips”.
The report said: “Direct sources reported the rape of girls as young as eight and women as young as 75.”
Victims often faced “beatings with punches, sticks, and whips before and during the rape”, with the sexual violence often occurring in the presence of victims’ relatives.
The mission said it had received credible information “about rape and gang rape of men and boys”.
UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Tuesday that escalating hostilities in Sudan’s eastern al-Jazeera state were further increasing the risk of atrocities.
Turki’s office said it had documented at least 25 cases of sexual violence in RSF attacks on Sharq al-Jazeera villages, including an 11-year-old girl who died as a result, while women and girls were abducted. Was done.
His spokesman Seph Magango told reporters that those responsible must be brought to justice “to break this terrible cycle of violence.”
– 14 million displaced –
Amy Pope, the head of the UN migration agency, said the situation in Sudan is “catastrophic” and requires greater attention.
“Sudan is easily the most neglected crisis in the world today,” he told a Geneva press briefing from Port Sudan.
“All wars are cruel, but the damage of this war is especially horrific… A generation will live in the shadow of the trauma.”
The latest figures from his agency released on Tuesday show there are more than 11 million internally displaced people within Sudan – 8.3 million of whom have fled their homes since the conflict began.
More than 31 lakh people have fled the country since April last year.
“More than half of the displaced people are women, and more than a quarter of them are children under the age of five,” the Pope said.
He said more than 200,000 people have fled their homes since September.
Despite the scale of displacement, the UN migration agency’s $168 million appeal has received only a fifth of that amount.
“With appropriate amounts of funding, we can do much to alleviate suffering,” the Pope said.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
