Johannesburg — The Sudan Rapid Support Forces, a camp in a civil war which tore the African nation apart 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 Human Rights Watch report. The New York-based rights organization 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 presents 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 had previously suffered victims. accused of war crimes.
Researchers collected evidence on 79 women and girls aged 7 to 50 who HRW said were raped, with most incidents occurring at an RSF military base in Dibeibat, near the town of Habila in Kordofan. South.
Survivors and witnesses told the group that the men who carried out the attacks were all members of uniformed RSF forces or allied militias.
“Survivors described being gang raped in front of their families and for prolonged periods of time, including while held as sex slaves,” said Belkis Wille, HRW’s associate crisis and conflict director, who has led numerous interviews with survivors.
Ezzaddean Elsafi, a senior RSF adviser, denied the accusations in the HRW report to CBS News, saying that “people wearing RSF uniforms” behind the alleged attacks were copycats and not real RSF forces.
“RSF takes this matter very seriously and will investigate. We are very sensitive to sexual violence against women and the perpetrators will be held accountable,” Elsafi said, denying that the group even has a significant presence in South Kordofan, while acknowledging that it has forces “in the Debibat region ”, near the border with South Kordofan. North Kordofan State.
“This is absolutely disinformation,” he said of the HRW report.
HRW said it shared a summary of its investigation’s findings with RSF’s overall commander, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but 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 amazes me after meeting these women and girls, this is the scope and scale” of sexual violence. 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 burst into her home in Habila and arrested her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew in her neighborhood. She said they were taken in 10 vehicles to the Dibeibat military base.
Human rights monitoring
When they arrived, Hania said she recognized more than 30 other girls from her town already there, with about 100 fighters holding them captive.
She said that when she tried to resist the rape, one of the activists “started beating me with a metal whip.” Over the next three months, she said, “fighters would come in groups of three every morning to take girls to rape them, then in the evening another group of three would come and take another group of girls to rape them.” rape them.”
Hania said RSF men detained her and the other women and girls in a sort of animal enclosure built with wire and tree branches, where they were chained in groups of ten. .
“What is clear from these cases is that in areas controlled by RSF, no place is safe – not if you flee, not even at home. Women and girls are at risk of being raped no matter where,” Wille told CBS News.
Another woman, Hasina, 35, told HRW that six men in RSF uniforms shot her husband and stole all their livestock and money. She explained that the cows were her family’s investment and that with them and her money stolen, she felt like she had no way to escape like many of her neighbors had done, and that she and her six young children, some of whom were just babies, had no choice but to flee. stay at home.
The RSF fighters returned three days later, she said, and “the three men raped me and left.”
Later that evening, “three more came back and raped me again and told me to stay at home.”
She said she was gang raped almost every day for the next month before fleeing.
Human rights monitoring
HRW met with Hasina at Camp Al-Hailu, a makeshift center with few or no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.
“She’s really barely able to wake up and keep moving forward because of what she’s been through. Her children are now in a camp with little food and seemed very malnourished when I saw them. … She has difficulty functioning as a mother,” Wille said, 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 with these women, they all looked at me blankly, because justice is a meaningless concept for them,” she said. declared. “The scale with which this is happening here means that it has become normalized behavior on the part of RSF. None of these women have ever heard of a soldier or fighter being held responsible.
Hania and a friend who was also pregnant managed to escape from their captors. They were interviewed by HRW in the Nouba Mountains. They said 49 girls were still detained at the base and that she had heard of girls also being detained at two other RSF bases.
“We have no way of knowing more about these women, because access is very difficult and dangerous, and in these areas there is no electricity, no mobile phone network, so no information does not come out. There is absolute silence about these abuses,” Wille 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 was the largest on record for the second consecutive year in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. About half of Sudan’s 50 million people are estimated to suffer from extreme hunger.
Last week, after twenty months of war, fighting appeared to intensify, with both sides accusing each other of committing new atrocities. International efforts to negotiate a peace deal have stalled and the fighting shows no end.
