"The first sound Zahara Abdulkarim heard when she woke that last morning in her village was the drone of warplanes circling overhead. Then came gunshots and screams and the sickening crash of bombs ripping though her neighbors' mud-and-thatch huts, gouging craters into the dry earth. When Abdulkarim, 25, ran outside, she was confronted by two men in military uniform, one wielding a knife, the other a whip. They were members, she says, of the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, which over the past 18 months has slaughtered tens of thousands of black Africans like Abdulkarim across the western Sudanese region of Darfur. Another man, rifle in hand, was standing over her husband's body while others set fire to her home. Two of the intruders, she says, grabbed her and force her to the ground. With her husband's body a few yards away, the men took turns raping her.
They called her a dog and a donkey. 'This year, there's no God except us,' Abdulkarim says they told her. 'We are your god now.' When they were finished, one of the men drew his knife and slashed deep across Abdulkarim's left thigh, a few inches above her knee. The scar would mark her as a slave, they told her, or brand her like one of their camels. By nightfall, says, Abdulkarim, more than 100 women in the town of Ablieh had been raped and dozens of people killed, including two of her sons, four of her in-laws and her husband. The only survivors in her compound were Abdulkarim and her son Mohammed, 6. 'They also wanted to kill me, but when they saw I was pregnant, they released me and let me live,' she says. That was eight months. Sheltering in a refugee camp in neighboring Chad, Abdulkarim, her baby Mustafa playing in her lap, says she will never go home" (Calabresi, Dealey, and Faris p.56).

Stories like Abdulkarim's are typical today. Janjaweed focus on the killing the men and boys and raping the women and girls. It's their form of ethnic cleansing: genocides and rape. Statistical numbers for the genocide haven't been kind either:

800,000 = The number of Africans driven from their homes
100,000 = The number of people who have crossed the border to Chad
10,000 = The number of people have died of thirst and hunger
(Stanton p.1)

Each day, hundreds of women and girls are brutally gang-raped and then branded, while the same number of men and boys are murdered. The madness will only end when the current government has been overthrown. Bills have been passed and enacted in various countries throughout the world to try and help stop the tragedies in Sudan. Unfortunately, little enforcement or seriousness has been taken regarding the bills.

Why is the world just now reacting? Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, believes four major points are the reason for the slow reaction: Racism, National Sovereignty, Impunity, and Indifference (Stanton p.2).

Over two million people in Darfur, Sudan have been affected by the genocides. Every day, more and more villages are burned down and people killed. How many more people need to die before the world takes this seriously? Though international laws prohibit other countries "to rule" one another and to respect the privacy of each country, when did killing off more than one million people become "okay?" Little information is available on the genocides because few people wish to acknowledge it. Every country is hoping another country will "take care of" the situation. Until every person, in every country has a strong idea of what is truly happening and is willing to do what it takes to change this slaughtering, very little will be done in the meantime.

 

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