In Sudan, some women, girls are choosing suicide to avoid rape

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It is tragically appropriate to take stock of two decades of war and genocide in Sudan and to commit to ending the violence against civilians, including the raping of women and girls.

Since 2003, the leaders of Sudan and others throughout the world have been failing to protect the women and girls of Sudan. Without hope or protection, they have nevertheless continued to choose life, but the horror and trauma of rape, gang rape and other sexual violence as a weapon of war is pushing more of them to commit suicide.

In 2003, Mukesh Kapila, while serving as the United Nations resident and humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, was one of the first such officials to recognize this millennium’s first genocide and to report the mass rapes against the women of Darfur. He recently told PassBlue that “the continuing criminality and inhumanity is a story of impunity foretold.”

After all, Kapila says, today’s perpetrators are “the direct ideological descendants of the Janjaweed.” He fears that “never again” is becoming “again and again” not only in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan but in far too many other places in the world.

Many of the atrocities in Darfur have been and continue to be committed by the Janjaweed militias, which in 2013 metastasized into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), when the former Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir formalized the militias into parallel forces to fight the armed rebel groups with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

After Al-Bashir was overthrown in a popular uprising in April 2019 and the military establishment refused to hand over power to a transitional civilian administration in October 2021, the SAF and the RSF ruled jointly until April 2023. Since then, they have been at war against each other and against the people of Sudan.

Although the SAF and RSF signed the Jeddah Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan in May 2023, the civilian toll has been staggering: more than 20,000 people have been reportedly killed, tens of thousands more injured and more than a hundred thousand more may have died of starvation and preventable diseases.

In October 2024, the International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan concluded, inter alia, that while there are documented cases involving the SAF, “the majority of rape and sexual and gender-based violence was committed by the RSF — in particular in Greater Khartoum, and Darfur and Gezira States.”

Stephen Rapp, a former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes and ex-prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, was the first to achieve convictions of sexual slavery and other sexual and gender-based violence as crimes against humanity in an international tribunal.

“Sudan teaches us that impunity breeds further impunity,” he wrote to PassBlue. “The guilty parties commit their atrocities against the most innocent because they have seen that they can do so without consequence.”

Rapp fears that “crimes against women and girls will not only continue but may even increase in brutality until the international community prioritizes accountability in Sudan and breaks the cycle of impunity as it did in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.”

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In June 2024, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution to protect civilians in Sudan. But the text downplayed the sexual and gender-based violence by expressing alarm at the incidences only once, in the preamble. On Nov. 18, the Security Council was ready to adopt another resolution that would have demanded the RSF to immediately halt all attacks against civilians and for both the SAF and the RSF to “take all feasible precautions to avoid and minimize civilian harm.” Having abstained in June, Russia surprisingly vetoed the draft resolution in November.

Without enforcing binding resolutions adopted by the Security Council and longstanding warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, including against Al-Bashir, there will be no end to war, to genocide or to rape in Sudan. It is no longer possible to deny that despite two decades of sanctions and referrals to the court; peacekeepers and special envoys; fact-finding missions and human rights commissions; and nonbinding declarations and binding resolutions, the world continues to leave Sudanese civilians at the mercy of inhumane and iniquitous forces.

So, it is tragically appropriate on the 25th anniversary of this International Day to acknowledge that the women and girls of Sudan have been raped and murdered for 21 of those 25 years.

Hala Al-Karib, the regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, presciently warned the Security Council in October 2023 about women and girls committing suicide, noting that “life after experiencing violence and torture at the hands of the RSF is unbearable.”

A year later, in October 2024, 130 women in Al Gezira State, central Sudan, reportedly committed mass suicide to avoid being raped by the RSF. Since then, news of women committing suicide by drowning themselves in the Nile have flooded social media. Al-Karib and her colleagues corroborated several cases of women killing themselves in the river rather than being raped, as well as “other cases of women drinking local hair dye after being raped by RSF in front of their male family members in one of the Al Gezira villages.”

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Al-Karib noted that the rapes and massacres in El Fasher in North Darfur and in El Geneina in West Darfur “left hundreds of women and teenage girls suffering from physical agony, injuries and trauma.”

More recently, Dominique Isabelle Hyde, director of external relations for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, reported that when 180 Sudanese attempted to flee from El Geneina, almost all were murdered, and most of the women were raped. Of the 17 people that survived the massacre, one woman died in childbirth and six women committed suicide, leaving “only 10 that arrived safely in Chad.”

Even when Sudanese refugees reach relative safety in neighboring Chad, many women and girls are sexually exploited and abused by the men sent to protect them. The Associated Press recently reported allegations that “humanitarian workers and local security forces have sexually exploited them in Chad’s displacement sites, offering money, easier access to assistance and jobs.”

Niemat Ahmadi, the founder and director of the Darfur Women Action Group, highlighted in the Security Council in April and in November the failure of the international community to protect the women of Sudan against sexual violence, “leaving them without option or hope for protection.”

As the UN promised when it adopted the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, it must recommit to the protection of women and girls and ensure accountability for perpetrators of crimes against them.

The Security Council can do this, Ahmadi says, by calling on all parties to stop targeting civilians and to stop all rapes and other sexual violence. She urged the Council to make all forms of sexual and gender-based violence “an explicit criterion for imposing sanctions” and “central to all criminal accountability processes.”

Finally, she also urged the Council to demand “the full and meaningful participation of Sudanese women in all processes regarding the future of Sudan.”

As for the rest of the world, let us “UNiTE” to stop rape and other sexual violence against women and girls in Darfur, in the rest of Sudan and everywhere where women pay the price of war. When such protection of civilians and the pursuit of justice and accountability prevail in Sudan, women and girls will choose survival over suicide. They will have hope for a future, where their dignity and worth as human beings and the sanctity of their lives as civilians are preserved.

This is an opinion essay.

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