Another Sickening Face of Darfur - Rape

"Halima Bashir is a survivor. She was tortured and gang- raped for days as a punishment for speaking out about an attack on primary school children in Darfur.

"Her crime was to tell people that a group of Janjaweed militia and government soldiers had attacked the primary school for girls, raping pupils as young as eight. She paid a terrible personal price.

"'They were aged between 8 and 13,' she said. 'They were in shock, bleeding, screaming and crying. It was horrific. Because I told people what happened, the authorities arrested me. They said, 'We will show you what rape is'. They beat me severely. At night, three men raped me.

"'The following day the same thing, different men. Torture and rape, every day, torture and rape.'

"The gang-rape of girls as young as eight has prompted fresh calls for intervention in the western Sudanese region, where tens of thousands of women and girls have been subjected to rape and other extreme sexual violence since the crisis erupted in 2003. The Islamist government in Khartoum has given the Janjaweed militia a free hand in putting down a rebellion by African tribes in the region, and there has not been a single conviction in Darfur for rape against displaced women and girls .

"'Rape is feared all the more in Darfur for two reasons. Most important, a woman who has been raped is ruined; deeply traumatised, in some cases she is thrown out of home by her family and forced to survive on her own,' the report, entitled Sexual Violence in Darfur, says. 'Raped women, not the perpetrators, are blamed. The woman is shamed for life and so is her entire family. Witnesses to large-scale attacks typically record repeated and systematically conducted incidents of widespread rape and other forms of sexual violence committed by armed groups. The mass rapes in Darfur have been among the most effective means to terrorise tribal populations, break their will and drive them away.'"

For Christ's sake, these are just kids. Of course we can't get involved in Darfur because all our troops are tied down in Afghanistan cleaning up a mess the Americans left in their president's insane drive to occupy Iraq.