Suffering of women during Sudan’s civil war and ethnic cleansing. Civil war in the Sudan began shortly before independence from Great Britain in 1956 and lasted until 1972. It was renewed in 1983 and continued until 2004. The main issue driving the Sudanese civil war is the attempt of the fundamentalist Islamic governments in the north to impose Sharia (Islamic law) and the Arabic language on the whole country. The southerners, ethnically African, are either ani-mist or Christian. They have resisted the religious imperialism of several Islamic governments. The groups in the south, however, have also fought each other over grazing lands and perceived tribal injustices.
Women in the Sudan have suffered in a variety of ways. The loss of family members and homelands has been the common lot of women in all parts of Sudan. The suffering has been greatest in the south, where violent death, disease, and starvation have killed great numbers of women and children. The psychological trauma has been devastating for many. Of those who have survived many are physically disfigured as well as emotionally scarred.
Rape has been used as a weapon against women and girls as young as seven years old. Some rapes have been random acts; however, rape has often been used as a matter of policy to disgrace women, destroy families, and sever tribal ties. In Darfur in northwestern Sudan during the early twenty-first century, "rape camps" contributed to the goal of ethnic cleansing of the Black-Africans via racial dilution. This has been cited as one of the justifications for calling that conflict genocide.
Human rights organizations have verified that southern women and girls have been abducted, taken to the north, and sold into slavery. Some women have been forcibly converted to Islam and married off. Boys under the age of seven are taken to the north and put into Islamic schools. Older males are slain if captured. Southerners, however, have also impressed young males into their guerrilla forces. The abuses suffered by southern women have been caused by combatants on both sides of the war.
In the decades of the civil war, homes and fields have been destroyed, crops have been seized, and hundreds of thousands of southerners have been displaced. Because African women are small-plot gardeners and the sole providers of food for their families, in subsistence economies this has been a serious loss. Seed and cultivating implements have been taken or destroyed, so if the women and children manage to escape the devastation of an attack on their village, there is nothing left when they return and no way to reestablish their livelihood.
Previous attempts to end the conflict had failed. On May 26, 2004, however, key protocols were signed by the government of Sudan and the principal south Sudanese rebel group, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. The agreement called for a ceasefire, a power-sharing administration over three contested areas, and autonomy for the south for six years, to be followed by a referendum on independence.
Since 2003 the Darfur region in the northwestern part of Sudan has been the scene of terrible suffering of Black-African Muslim women at the hands of the Janjaweed, government-backed Arab militias. Rape and rape camps have been part of the anti-Black-African ethnic cleansing. The Black African Muslim women who conceive as a result of the gang rapes give birth to children who are labeled Janjaweed babies. The stigma remains with the mother and child forever. Such a child is called Devil on Horseback (the literal translation for the word Janjaweed) before he or she can even crawl.
One unexpected consequence of the civil war has been that some women in the south have been freed from traditional male dominance. With males either dead or gone some women have had to fend for themselves. Others have organized groups such as the Sudanese Women’s Voice for Peace (SWVP); the Widows, Orphans, and the Disabled Rehabilitation Association of New Sudan (WODRANS); the New Sudan Woman’s Federation (NSWF); and the Mundri Relief and Development Association (MRDA).
Women of the southern area have also engaged in armed conflict. Some have risen in the ranks of units into which they enlisted or into which they were forced. Some have become officers and noncommissioned officers. In 1984 the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, which led the resistance in the second part of the civil war, formed a Girls’ Battalion, which subsequently disbanded. Since 1991 the participation of women in combat has been reduced. Former women soldiers have risen in the governmental units formed in the south.
