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.
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