A year later, Sudanese raped in crackdown wait for justice

Two or three times a week, Mayada goes to visit her baby daughter at the foster home. Sometimes, she breastfeeds her if she has milk, or she just sits and lulls the 3-month-old to sleep. She left Marwa at the home because she's too poor and ill to care for her, she said. Not because she doesn't love her — not because the little girl is a legacy of a horrific day a year ago in the streets of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

“Sometimes I feel like I love her more than my other children,” said the 22-year-old. “She has no guilt. It's me who feels guilty.” Mayada was among dozens of women raped by Sudanese security forces over the course of a few hours on June 3, 2019. In a rampage that day, fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and other troops tore apart a sit-in camp in Khartoum where protesters had been demanding for weeks that the military give up power. At least 87 people were killed, with activists putting the number at more than 120. A military-backed prosecutor said no rapes or sexual assaults took place during the violence. But over the past year, activists have been documenting what they say was a campaign of rapes — ordered by the military's leadership to crush the pro-democracy movement.

"It was an orchestrated scenario .... All was by order and systematic,” said Sulima Ishaq Sharif, who at the time headed a trauma center at Khartoum's Ahfad University. Her center documented at least 64 rape victims. The Sudan Doctors Union identified at least 60 rape victims, said Dr. Howida al-Hassan, a member of the union who counseled survivors.

Both experts say the real number is considerably higher, since many victims don't speak for fear of reprisal or the stigma connected to rape. They said many more women were sexually assaulted and several men were among those raped. Identifying and prosecuting those behind the violence is a major test of whether Sudan can shed its decades-long military rule.

The protest movement, which began in 2018, succeeded in ousting longtime military strongman, President Omar al-Bashir, in April 2019 and forcing the creation of a joint civilian-military ruling “sovereign council.” But the civilians are struggling to assert authority in the face of the military's power. Most notably, the council's deputy head is the commander of the RSF, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who is considered the strongest man in the leadership and enjoys the backing of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. An independent commission investigating the violence already missed one deadline in February for releasing its conclusions. It may also miss a new deadline, June 22, because work has halted amid the coronavirus pandemic, the commission's head, Nabil Adib, told The Associated Press.

Still, Adib said the panel has taken testimony from some 3,000 witnesses. It “has found a number of crimes, including rape, that were committed during the dispersal, and also identified some suspects,” he said, refusing to give details. Victims and activists have little faith the military will allow any findings that implicate top generals.

Dagalo and the military have said the troops that day had no orders to clear the camp, only to clamp down on part of it where drug-dealing and other crimes allegedly took place. Spokesmen for the military and the RSF did not respond to multiple AP requests for comment. The AP spoke to six rape victims, whom it is identifying only by first names.

They told similar stories of RSF fighters corralling up men and women who fled the protest site, beating them, sexually molesting the women and gang-raping some. By their accounts, the rapes took place in specific locations — in a medical complex, a cemetery and the grounds of Khartoum University's mosque. The women's ordeal embodies the terrible personal price paid by activists in crackdowns that have crushed pro-democracy movements around the Middle East in recent years.

For Samah, a 28-year-old teacher, the wounds of her gang-rape that day are reopened whenever she sees Dagalo on TV. “Watching him sends chills through my body,” she said.

Mayada had lived on her own the past three years, one of the many impoverished women who sell tea on the sidewalks of Khartoum. Married and divorced as a teen, her ex-husband took their two children. Her parents kicked her out after she refused to remarry. Samah was asleep in a tent when gunfire erupted. She heard screaming and saw people running in panic as security forces fired. Some fell to the ground, bleeding.

She ran barefoot from the tent. Blocks away, outside the al-Bashir Medical Center, she was caught by RSF fighters rounding up whomever they could grab. Samah saw the fighters pull a woman away, shouting that they would rape her. She heard the woman screaming. Other troops dragged Samah into a hallway in the medical center. One hit her with his rifle butt. “If you open your mouth, I'll kill you, whore,” he shouted.

“I was trying to scream but they shut my mouth,” Samah said. Three of them raped her, she said. She felt each had a specific role in a specific mission.

“They did not do this for enjoyment,” she said. “They did so to break us down.” They left her naked and bloody on the hall floor. She covered herself with what was left of her robe, then found some other protesters hiding in a nearby clinic. “I didn't tell them I'd been raped but I think they knew from my condition.” One woman gave her a scarf to cover her hair.