"Sudan’s government dispatches rapists the way other governments dispatch the police, the better to terrorize black African tribes and break their spirit."
-Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, 8/31/08
Nicholas Kristof illuminates a new book about the be released in the States entitled
"Tears of the Desert," the first memoir written by a female caught in the Darfur genocide.
The story comes from Dr. Halima Bashir, who has risked her life to publish this work, after first risking her life to treat young victims of the unspeakable brutalities being perpetrated by the Janjaweed in Darfur, Western Sudan.
Here's some of Kristof's article (masked in the cloak of an OpEd...but keep up the incredible work...Kristof is a fearless pioneer in journalism. He continually publishes human rights stories from the deepest, darkest corners of the world, stories that other major media outlets brush aside with a long pole; stories that stir the mind and trouble the heart. Stories that we should be hearing, stories that will create the outrage needed to stop the atrocities being committed by governments and rebel groups around the world. I applaud you, Nicholas Kristof, once again).
In 10 days, Halima’s extraordinary memoir will be published in the United States, at considerable risk to herself. She writes in “Tears of the Desert” of growing up in a placid village in rural Darfur, of her wonder at seeing white people for the first time, of her brilliant performance in school.
Eventually Halima became a doctor, just as the genocide against black African tribes like her own began in 2003. Halima soon found herself treating heartbreaking cases, like that of a 6-year-old boy who suffered horrendous burns when the state-sponsored janjaweed militia threw him into a burning hut.
One day she gave an interview in which she delicately hinted that the Darfur reality was more complicated than the Sudanese government version. The authorities detained her, threatened her, warned her to keep silent and transferred her to a remote clinic where there were no journalists around to interview her.
Then the janjaweed attacked a girls’ school near Halima’s new clinic and raped dozens of the girls, aged 7 to 13. The first patient Halima tended to was 8 years old. Her face was bashed in and her insides torn apart. The girl was emitting a haunting sound: “a keening, empty wail kept coming from somewhere deep within her throat — over and over again,” she recalls in the book.
Sudan’s government dispatches rapists the way other governments dispatch the police, the better to terrorize black African tribes and break their spirit. What sometimes isn’t noted is that many young Darfuri girls undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation, in which the vagina is stitched closed until marriage; that makes such rapes of schoolgirls particularly violent and bloody, increasing the risk of AIDS transmission.
Halima found herself treating the girls with tears streaming down her own face. All she had to offer the girls for their pain was half a pill each of acetaminophen: “At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with 8-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures to go around.”
