'We Want to Make a Light Baby'

A mother in a village in Darfur warns her daughter not to leave the schoolhouse where other women are hiding from the militiamen. (Emily Wax - The Washington Post)

"The man said, 'Give me your money, slave,' " she said, starting to cry. "Then I must tell you very frankly, he raped me. He had a gun to my head. He called me dirty abid. He said I was very ugly because my skin is so dark. What will I do now?"

In Tawilah, a village southeast of El Fasher, women and children are living in a musty school building. They said it was too dangerous to leave and plant food.

Fatima Aisha Mohammad, once a schoolteacher, stood in a dank classroom describing what happened to her three weeks ago, when she left the school to collect firewood.

"Very frankly, they selected us ladies and had what they wanted with us, like you would a wife," said Mohammad, 46, who has five children. "I am humiliated. Always they said, 'You are nothing. You are abid. You are too black.' It was disgusting."

During a recent visit, government minders warned people at the school to stop talking about the rapes or face beatings or death. Minders also were seen handing out bribes to keep women from speaking to foreign visitors. But those at the school spoke anyway. A group of people handed a journalist two letters in Arabic that listed 40 names of rape victims, and wanted the list to be sent to Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Frank R. Wolf of Virginia, Republicans who were touring the region and pressing the government to disarm the Janjaweed.

"I was sad. I am now very angry. Now they are trying to silence us. And they can't," Mohammad said. "What will people think of all of us out here? That we did this to ourselves? People will know the truth about what is happening in Darfur."

Later that day in Tawilah's town center, Kalutum Kharm, a midwife, gathered a crowd under a tree to talk about the rapes. Everyone was concerned about the children who would be born as a result.

"What will happen? We don't know how to deal with this," Kharm lamented. "We are Muslims. Islam says to love children no matter what. The real problem is we need security. We don't trust the government. We need this raping to stop."

Aid workers and refugees in Geneina said that despite an announcement last week by Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, that the Janjaweed would be disarmed, security had not improved. Janjaweed dressed in military uniforms and clutching satellite phones roamed the markets and the fields, guns slung over their shoulders. Last week, the Janjaweed staged a jailbreak and freed 13 people, aid workers said. They also killed a watermelon salesman and his brother because they did not like their prices, family members of the men said.

A government official, speaking with a reporter, described the rapes as an inevitable part of war and dismissed accusations by human rights organizations that the attacks were ethnically based.

In Geneina, two women told their stories while sitting in front of their makeshift straw shelter. One of the women, a thin 19-year-old with dead eyes, moved forward.

"I am feeling so shy but I wanted to tell you, I was raped too that day," whispered Aisha Adam, the tears rushing out of her eyes as she covered her face with her head scarf. "They left me without my clothing by the dry riverbed. I had to walk back naked. They said, 'You slave. This is not your area. I will make an Arab baby who can have this land.' I am hurting now so much, because no one will marry me if they find out."

Sitting on mats outside the shelter, Sawela Suliman's father talked with village elders about what to do if his daughter became pregnant.

"If the color is like the mother, fine," he said as a crowd gathered to listen. "If it is like the father, then we will have problems. People will think the child is an Arab."

Then his daughter looked up.

"I will love the child," she said, as other women in the crowd agreed. "But I will always hate the father."

Then the rains came. They pounded onto the family's frail shelter, turning their roof into a soggy and dripping clump of straw. Suliman started to shiver as the weather shifted from steaming hot to a breezy rain. She will no longer leave the area of her hut to collect straw. She will stay here, hiding as if in prison, she said, and praying that she is not pregnant.