(Photo from We The Women)Piercing The Silence -- Newsweek
Few Darfuri women are willing to talk about being raped. One survivor explains why she has gone public—and how she hopes it will help her ravaged people.
Too often, atrocities blur into abstractions. The burned-out villages; the camps for the desperate displaced; the brutalized women—for all that we've seen, read and heard about Darfur, for all the celebrities who've adopted it as their own cause célèbre, it's still hard for us to get a real sense of the hideousness that has taken place there. Halima Bashir might be the person who finally pulls us through that barrier.
Bashir was 24 when the Sudanese soldiers came for her. By then, of course, she was already sadly familiar with her country's political tensions. As a village child sent to school in the city, she had been taunted by members of Sudan's Arab elite for being African. As a medical student, her studies were repeatedly disrupted when the authorities closed down her campus and tried to force students to fight in what she called the "plastic jihad" against non-Muslim Sudanese in the south. But it was when she first saw the bleeding bodies of the 8-year-old girls from the school in the remote Darfuri village of Mazkhabad that she realized "someone had let the devil in" to her country.
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My Comment: And the Sudanese leadership wonder why there are War Crime indictments against them.