MALAIKA MAHLATSI: From Sudan to Palestine, women and children are the main casualties of war

On the 28th of July 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report titled: Khartoum is Not Safe for Women! Sexual Violence against Women in girls in Sudan’s Capital.

The 95-page report, which I read with horror, documents widespread sexual violence against women and children in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum and its sister cities of Bahri and Omdurman.

The violence is the direct result of the ongoing civil war which started just over a year ago. The war is being fought between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who is referred to as Hemedti.

The RSF is a successor of the Janjaweed, an Arab nomad militia group from that operates mainly in the Sahel region. The group has been responsible for violence in the region and played a central role in the Darfur War that started in 2003, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.

Al-Burhan and Hemedti played an instrumental role in the formation and leadership of the Transitional Military Council (TMC), a military junta that governed Sudan following the 2019 coup d'état that led to the overthrowing of then-president, Omar al-Bashir.

The coup d'état followed months of sustained protests and demonstrations by Sudanese people against the al-Bashir government that was presiding over economic collapse.

Facing a cost of living crisis that has hurled millions of people into extreme poverty, Sudanese people wanted a change of government. Just two months into the widespread protests, the al-Bashir government instituted a state of national emergency.

It was against this backdrop that in April 2023, the coup d'état was carried out, leading to the dissolution of cabinet and the national legislature. The TMC was established, with al-Burhan as its leader and Hemedti as his deputy leader.

From the onset, the TMC has been at the centre of violence, with its security forces killing hundreds of innocent civilians in the 2019 Khartoum massacre. The ongoing violence is a continuation of this, and as with the Darfur War, women have borne the brunt.

The HRW report documents the experiences of women and girls in the recent conflict, with accounts from the victims and survivors, healthcare workers providing them medical assistance, emergency volunteers, social workers, and lawyers. The 262 victims and survivors of the sexual violence, which include the emergency volunteers, are aged between nine and 60, with most of them being young.

Accounts from women and girls in areas of Khartoum seized by the RSF indicate that many were abducted, tortured and imprisoned as sex slaves. Others were gang-raped and forced into marriages, with those putting up resistance brutally murdered. Mothers were raped as punishment for attempting to protect their daughters.

The HRW report is not the first to document the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in Sudan. In March 2011, Amnesty International released a report titled: Darfur: Rape as a weapon of war: Sexual violence and its consequences, which also detailed the rape, torture and killing of girls and women by the SAF and Janjaweed.

Other human rights organisations, United Nations (UN) fact-finding missions and independent journalists have also documented harrowing accounts of the horrific violence that characterises conflict in Sudan.

But the violence does not end with sexual crimes, it extends to the use of starvation as a weapon of war. This is done in three ways.

First, the armed militia engages in literal scorched earth tactics, where they burn down farmlands to deprive communities of the means to produce their own food and to feed their livestock. In addition to this, there have been reports of the poisoning of water wells and boreholes, aimed at ensuring that no water resources are available.

Secondly, there is exploitation of humanitarian assistance, with food provisions meant for the starving population looted by the militia for its own use.

Thirdly, the SAF and RSF engage in the blockage of roads and ports to ensure that no humanitarian aid reaches the intended recipients. This, alongside the rape and maiming of humanitarian workers and local emergency volunteers, has led widespread famine.

The UN has referred to the humanitarian crisis as “unprecedented and never witnessed before”.

According to UN figures, by the end of June 2024, more than 16,000 people had been killed, hundreds of thousands wounded, and millions displaced, a significant proportion of which are women and girls.

The situation in Sudan is identical to that happening in Palestine, where, since October 2023, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands wounded.

According to the UN, roughly 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced and are being pushed into ever diminishing and extremely overcrowded places in southern Gaza in unsanitary and unhealthy conditions.

The fears contained in a report published two months ago by Oxfam International, titled: Epidemic risk rising as Rafah invasion compounds lethal cocktail of over-crowding, sewage and hunger have come to pass, as Palestine is now in the grips of a cholera and polio outbreak.

On Monday, the 29th of July, Gaza’s health ministry declared a polio epidemic across the Palestinian enclave. The apartheid state of Israel has, since October 2023, caused over US$200 million worth of damage to the water and sanitation infrastructure in Gaza alone, with more damage also done in other parts of the Gaza Strip, as well as Rafah and the occupied West Bank.

As with Sudan, women and children are the biggest casualties in the Israeli war in Palestine. Four months ago, reports were indicating that more children had died in Gaza in four months than had died globally between 2019 and 2022.

From Sudan to Palestine, and everywhere in the world, women and children are the biggest casualties of war. This is why it is important that our analysis of violent conflict is centred on the impact on these two vulnerable groups.

Speaking and writing about war only in terms of infrastructure destruction, loss of lives and economic devastation, without making specific mention to the impact on women and children, denies us an important understanding that war is aimed at obliterating specific religious, racial, ethnic and geographic populations.

This obliteration is targeted at women specifically because they carry and raise children, and at children because they represent the next generation that war intends to wipe off the face of the earth.

A gendered analysis of war is crucial. It does not exclude other victims – it demonstrates the complex and multidimensional ways in which war is not gender neutral.