The New York Times
Magboula's Brush With Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 23, 2004
ALONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER — Meet Magboula Muhammad Khattar and her baby, Nada.
I wrote about Ms. Khattar in my last two columns, recounting how the Janjaweed Arab militia burned her village, murdered her parents and finally tracked her family down in the mountains. Ms. Khattar hid, but the Janjaweed caught her husband and his brothers, only 4, 6 and 8 years old, and killed them all.
Ms. Khattar decided that the only hope for saving her two daughters and her baby sister was to lead them by night to Chad. They had to avoid wells where the Janjaweed kept watch, but eight days later, half-dead with hunger and thirst, they staggered across the dry riverbed that marks the border with Chad.
That's where I found Ms. Khattar. She is part of a wave of 1.2 million people left homeless by the genocide in Darfur.
....
As for Ms. Khattar, she is camping beneath a tree, sharing the shade with three other women also widowed by the Janjaweed. In some ways Ms. Khattar is lucky; her children all survived. Moreover, in some Sudanese tribes, widows must endure having their vaginas sewn shut to preserve their honor, but that is not true of her Zaghawa tribe.
Ms. Khattar's children have nightmares, their screams at night mixing with the yelps of jackals, and she worries that she will lose them to hunger or disease. But her plight pales beside that of Hatum Atraman Bashir, a 35-year-old woman who is pregnant with the baby of one of the 20 Janjaweed raiders who murdered her husband and then gang-raped her.
Ms. Bashir said that when the Janjaweed attacked her village, Kornei, she fled with her seven children. But when she and a few other mothers crept out to find food, the Janjaweed captured them and tied them on the ground, spread-eagled, then gang-raped them.
"They said,
`You are black women, and you are our slaves,' and they also said other bad things that I cannot repeat," she said, crying softly. "One of the women cried, and they killed her. Then they told me, `If you cry, we will kill you, too.' " Other women from Kornei confirm her story and say that another woman who was gang-raped at that time had her ears partly cut off as an added humiliation.
One moment Ms. Bashir reviles the baby inside her. The next moment, she tearfully changes her mind. "I will not kill the baby," she said. "I will love it. This baby has no problem, except for his father."
Ms. Khattar, the orphans, Ms. Bashir and countless more like them have gone through hell in the last few months, as we have all turned our backs — and the rainy season is starting to make their lives even more miserable. In my next column, I'll suggest what we can do to save them.
For readers eager to act now, some options are at www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, Posting 479.
The rest of the article is at the above link. Now you've read this, thought about it...Are you going to act or are you OK with being quiet?
-Rudey