The refugees escaping the civil war in Sudan recount the violence which took the lives of many men and boys. That violence, they say, was directed towards those of particular tribes and skin colors.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It might be hard to picture what more than 10 million refugees looks like because it’s human suffering on an unimaginable scale. But 10 million is the number of people who’ve been displaced by civil war in Sudan over the last year and a half, as the Sudanese army battles a paramilitary group known as Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. One glimpse into the crisis is in neighboring Chad, where hundreds of thousands of people have fled to makeshift camps. NPR’s Fatma Tanis went to some of these camps. And we should note her reporting will describe atrocities of war. Hi, Fatma.
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: So can you just first give us a sense of what these refugee camps were like when you visited?
TANIS: Sure. You know, Ailsa, immediately, you notice something’s odd when you’re here. There are hundreds of thousands of women, but barely any men around. I was at the border crossing in Adre, between Chad and Sudan, talking to people as they crossed. And they told me about the absolute lack of food in Sudan. They described disturbing accounts of sexual assault. They barely had any bags with them because they said they’d been robbed on the way.
There are also a lot of pregnant women here or, you know, women who have very young babies. But their husbands haven’t been around for a while, or they’re too young to be married. And both Sudanese women and aid organizations told me that these are pregnancies from rape. You can see it in people’s faces. The women I spoke with – they appeared to be in shock. They had seen horrific things but were describing them to me with flat voices and not much emotion.
CHANG: Oh, my God. That’s horrible. You said that the majority of people who are coming are women and children. Where are the men?
TANIS: That’s a question I asked everyone I met. I said, where are your husbands, fathers, brothers, sons? They told me they were killed or prevented from leaving or missing. Very few women I spoke with say they know where their husbands are at this point. There were some teenage boys in the camps, and I found out that they were able to escape because their mothers had dressed them as girls.
One woman I met – her name is Suad Abdulaziz. She’s 29 years old. I found her sitting with six children in front of their tent. Their clothes were in tatters. Their socks were torn. They came to Chad in April. And she told me that she saw the RSF round up over 120 men and boys in her town in West Darfur.
SUAD ABDULAZIZ: (Speaking Arabic).
TANIS: And then she says, “they fired on them and killed them all.”
CHANG: Is this random violence against civilians, or do we know if certain groups are being targeted by the RSF?
TANIS: Everyone here told me they were targeted. They said the RSF are going after certain African tribes – you know, people with darker skin. I met a family in another refugee camp in Farchana, which is a small town. The mother’s name is Zahra Isa Ali. She says that her husband was shot and killed in front of her and her children.
She said a group of RSF soldiers barged into their house and asked them, are you Masalit? That’s the name of one of the targeted tribes I mentioned. The family answered yes, and immediately they shot her husband. Then she said that they began to hurl insults at them, calling them slaves. She said that the leader of the group gathered the family outside and told them they would kill anyone who is Black, even shooting a black donkey nearby to make his point.
And I asked Zahra did you know they would try to kill you if you said you were Masalit? She said, yes. Then I asked her, why didn’t you say no?
ZAHRA ISA ALI: (Speaking Arabic).
TANIS: And you can hear the determination in her voice as she says here, “we would never deny who we are.”
CHANG: That is NPR’s Fatma Tanis reporting from eastern Chad. Thank you so much, Fatma.
TANIS: Thank you.
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