“But why? Why did this happen? What wrong did we do to them?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll stop them. Don’t worry. We will never let this happen to you again . . .”
I turned away from the little girl and wiped a hand, exhaustedly, across my face. It was slick with blood, but I was too far gone to care. There was a thumping pain inside my head, as if it was about to explode. I felt the little girl’s mother beside me, her arms around my shoulders. She held me and hugged me tight. I rested for a moment on her. I knew most of the parents in the village by name, and their children. They were like my family, and we were united in the pain and the horror of what had happened.
“God give you strength,” she whispered. “God give you strength. God give you the strength to help them. And God willing, it will be all right. It will be all right.”
I held on to her, gathering my strength for the next little girl. I steeled myself to go on, to deal with the pain of it all. I looked at her. Nodded. I was ready.
Her dark eyes met mine. They were pools of incomprehension and pain. She shook her head in disbelief. “How could they? How could anyone do this to little children?”
I shrugged. “Only God knows. Only God knows.”
“The Janjaweed . . . The Janjaweed . . .” she whispered. “They want to drive our children insane, our children . . .”
“God is stronger than they are,” I told her. “They are like the devil, but they are weak. God is strong. He will destroy them. They attack children, like the cowards they are. But one day God will finish them all . . .”
As I went to treat the next little girl I told myself that I had to be strong. I had to be strong for them all. For everyone. All of them were relying on me, and if any of the little girls failed to survive I would blame myself for not having saved them. But I didn’t know if I could be strong. I felt the anger and rage rising up inside me, hot and bitter and corrosive like acid, threatening to overwhelm me. I wanted to fight. I wanted to fight them all. I wanted to fight and kill every Arab, to slaughter them, to drive them out of our country.
I felt hatred like a furnace blasting its fire and rage inside me, burning, burning for revenge. I tried to channel that hatred, to use it to give me the strength to go on. I picked up the needle and thread and turned to the next little girl. . . . As the morning wore on one trauma merged into the next, until it became like one long terrible vision of hell. It was as if evil itself had come to our village, as if the devil himself had come to do his very worst.
The youngest of the girls was just seven years old, the oldest thirteen. All of them had been circumcised. They had been repeatedly attacked in an unimaginably brutal bout of sexual violence. Of the two teachers, I knew that at least one had also been raped. I could see the pain in Miss Sumiah’s face, the fear and revulsion in her eyes.
Miss Sumiah was about the same age as me. She was a tall, elegant, beautiful black African woman from the Massalit tribe. And she was a lovely, gentle person. In Sudanese culture a teacher was someone who should always be respected, so this made the rape even more of a violation. It was as if the Janjaweed had targeted the school to show they could do exactly what they wanted with us—as if that was the way to instill the worst possible terror.
Sumiah told me not a word of what had happened to her. I knew that she was trying to hide it, and I understood why. Sumiah was married, and she didn’t want her husband to know. She was feeling guilty: guilty that she hadn’t resisted her attackers, fought them off, or died trying to do so.
Better to have died and preserved one’s dignity, than to have suffered the soul death of rape—that’s what the Massalit, and the Zaghawa, believed.
But I was having none of that. As far as I was concerned, every single woman and child in that room was a victim. For what could they possibly have done to resist? I had heard rumors of rape. We all had. It was part of the dark and evil texture of this war. But I’d never quite believed them. And not for one moment had I conceived that grown men could be capable of doing such things to little children. Yet now I had seen it with my own eyes, and I knew that the unthinkable was true.
It was early evening by the time I had finished stitching up the last of the girls. Sayed and I had been doing the suturing, with Makka—the nurse with midwifery training—lending a hand. Nurse Sumah had been cleaning the wounds, with the store man keeping the charcoal stoves running and boiling pot after potful of water. There was one saving grace to the horrors of the day: Nearly all of the girls were too young to have been made pregnant by their attackers. But it was something that would be lost on the traumatized victims.
Forty-odd girls had been brought to the clinic, but I knew there were more rape victims than that. In some cases their parents were so ashamed that they had taken their daughters home, and would be treating them privately with traditional cures. In that way they hoped to keep the violation of their loved ones secret. It was a sad fact in our culture that rape victims were somehow seen as being damaged goods, their lives destroyed by the evil that had happened to them.
By the time the day was done most of the girls were able to return home. Eight of the worst victims—the smallest, youngest, most serious cases—remained. They were in deep shock and unable to stop crying. Among the eight was little Aisha, the first victim that I had treated. I kept each of them on their beds, with a drip of saline solution mixed with glucose going into their arm. This would help with both the blood loss and the shock.
I told the parents of the eight to go and fetch their daughters a little food. They had to try to eat. A little soup would be best—maybe chicken or lamb broth, something easy to digest. I’d had no time to eat myself, but the last thing on my mind was food. I was too shocked and sickened by all that I had seen to even think about eating.
Once the girls had tried to eat a little, I gave each half a sleeping tablet, so that they might find the sweet forgetfulness of sleep. Each of the girls drifted off into the land of their dreams. I just hoped and prayed that their dreamland would remain free from dark and evil nightmares.
I went and sat at my desk, burying my head in my hands. I closed my eyes and laid my face down on the smooth wooden surface. Apart from the girls’ parents I was alone now. Sayed, Makka, and the other staff had gone home to get some rest. Soon, I felt a presence at my side. I looked up. It was Sumiah, the teacher rape victim.
She gestured toward the girls. “I just came back to see how they are.”
“They’re sleeping, which is good. I hope they’ll be better in the morning.”
“You look tired . . .”
I shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep much, not after today . . .”
“Still, you need to get some rest.”
“Sumiah, tell me what happened . . . I mean, if you don’t feel able to it’s okay . . . But I just feel I need to know . . .”
“You really want to hear?”
I nodded. I did. For some reason that I couldn’t quite explain, I needed to know. Perhaps the knowing might help me deal with my burning anger and pain. I might begin to understand the full horror, and so come to terms with it . . .
“It was around nine o’clock,” Sumiah began. “Lessons had just started. All of a sudden, I heard the pounding of hooves and wild yelling. Doors were smashed in and the windows too. We didn’t even have time to cry for help. Suddenly they were inside . . .”
Sumiah paused, her face downcast, her eyes looking inward as she relived it all.
I touched her arm, gently. “Don’t if you can’t. Don’t go on.”
Sumiah shrugged. “It’s better to talk . . . I need to . . . It was like a band of wild animals just jumping on us and forcing us to the floor. All around me girls were being raped, regardless of their age. The Janjaweed carried guns, knives, heavy sticks—the ones they use to beat their horses. If any girl tried to resist they beat her with those sticks . . .”
Sumiah glanced at me. “They were shouting and screaming at us. You know wh
at they were saying? ‘We have come here to kill you! To finish you all! You are black slaves! You are worse than dogs! Either we kill you or we give you Arab children. Then there will be no more black slaves in this country.’ But you know the worst? The worst was that they were laughing and yelping with joy as they did those terrible things. Those grown men were enjoying it, as they passed the little girls around . . .”
In all the confusion one or two of the girls managed to escape. They ran to their homes and raised the alarm. But when the parents rushed to the school they found a cordon of government soldiers had surrounded it and were letting nobody in. If anyone came too close, the soldiers shot at them with their guns. Parents could hear their daughters screaming, but there was no way they could help.
For two hours they held the school. They abused the girls in front of their friends, forcing them to watch what they were doing. Any girls who tried to resist were beaten in the head with sticks or rifle butts.
“Before they left, they spat on us and urinated on us,” Sumiah whispered. “They said: ‘We will let you live so you can tell your mothers and fathers and brothers what we did to you. Tell them from us: If you stay, the same and worse will happen to you all. Next time, we will show no mercy. Leave this land. Sudan is for the Arabs. It is not for black dogs and slaves.’ ”
I stayed at the clinic late into the night, my mind a whirl of exhausted thoughts. I kept replaying Sumiah’s words in my mind. Sudan is for the Arabs. It is not for black dogs and slaves.Where had such blind, unreasoning hatred come from? Who but the evil and the insane could be capable of such bestial behavior toward innocent children? It was inhuman. And where would it ever end? Where would it end?
I had no reason to stay any longer at the clinic now. The girls were fast asleep, and even their parents were dropping. I was staying for one reason only: I was scared, so scared, of being alone. I forced myself to my feet. I told the parents that if there was anything—anything at all—then they must come and fetch me. The place where I stayed was nearby, and it was unlikely that I would be sleeping.
As I walked home through the darkened village I tried to face my fear. I was scared of the night itself, but still I stuck to the shadows so as not to be seen. I was scared that the Janjaweed would come again. When I reached home I found that Aisha had waited up for me. She had been in the market that morning, selling her wares, and so she had seen the crowd. When I told her the details of what had happened she was sickened beyond words.
“Even the children? Even the children? Even those little girls?”
“Even the children,” I confirmed. “They targeted the school, deliberately, to destroy our very souls.”
“We have to fight them,” Aisha declared. “We have to kill them all. They are like a dark evil, spreading throughout this land. . . . We have to kill them all.”
I was silent. Aisha glanced at me. In the firelight she could see that I was crying. She reached out and held me, rocking me in her arms. With the children, I had tried to be strong. With them I had tried to hide my emotions, to hold back my tears. Now I could let them flow.
When we retired to our huts I took a stick with me and hid it under the bed. I lay there all night long, straining my ears in the darkness. If I heard them coming I would run and try to escape. But if they caught me, I would take up my stick and fight. Terrible images crowded into my mind: images from the school that morning; images of pain and lost innocence from the clinic that day.
As I tossed and turned those images turned into ones of my own village under assault, of my family fleeing from the screaming hordes of the Janjaweed. I wondered how far this evil madness had spread. Maybe all of the schools were being attacked. Maybe this evil and darkness was everywhere across our land. Here I was so far from home, so far from my family and my people.
As soon as it was light I hurried down to the clinic to check on the girls. Most were still fast asleep. The ones who were awake were in pain, and they were afraid even to go to the restroom, as it was such agony to do so. I prepared hot water so they could wash. It would be soothing, and it might make it easier to go to the restroom. Aisha’s mother and father were there, and they kept thanking me for helping their daughter.
“If it weren’t for you, doctor, we don’t know what we would have done,” her father said. “But d’you think our daughter will go crazed in the head because of this? That’s our greatest fear . . .”
“She didn’t sleep well at all,” her mother added. “She was crying, thrashing about, waking up with horrible screams. She said she could still see those men, even in her sleep.”
“You know, time is a great healer,” I said. “With time they will forget. And with time they will heal physically, too. Everything will go back to normal, you’ll see.”
I did my rounds checking on the girls. When I came to little Aisha she grabbed hold of my arm.
“I don’t want those bad people to come again,” she whispered. “Don’t let them. You’ll stop them, won’t you? Please, don’t let the Janjaweed get me . . .”
“Don’t worry, don’t cry, little sister,” I comforted her. “Don’t worry, we’ll protect you. You’re safe now. You’re safe here with us.”
If only it were true. If only it were true.
I spent the day with the girls, trying to comfort them. By midafternoon there was little more that we could do at the clinic. They needed to eat and sleep, so that their bodies and minds could recover. And they needed to try to forget. The best place to do so was at home. One by one girls and parents left the clinic. As they did so I wondered just where the fat commander of police had been on the morning of the attack. Not a thing went on in the village without him knowing, yet strangely, he was nowhere to be seen.
Sayed and I were just clearing up the treatment room when I heard a vehicle stopping outside. Maybe it was the police commander. Maybe he’d decided that he did exist, after all. Instead, two smartly dressed men came and introduced themselves to me. They were from the United Nations, they told me, and they had come to the village to investigate reports on an attack on the school. Did I know anything about it? Had I heard anything? Seen anything? Could the terrible reports that they had heard be true?
I agreed to tell them all that I knew on one condition—that my name wasn’t used. I told them that I was scared. I had already been in trouble with the authorities, and I didn’t want to be so again. Two of the girls had yet to leave the clinic, and as long as their parents were happy then the UN workers could also speak with them. That way, they could hear for themselves exactly what had happened, and from two of the victims.
As they listened to the accounts of the attack on the school the UN men were visibly shaken. They took notes of everything, and they even took some photos of the two little girls. Eventually they left, promising to lodge immediate reports of the attack via their organization. They also pledged to return to the clinic in the next few days with extra medical supplies.
During the days that followed I made a point of visiting the homes of the rape victims, so that I could check on them personally and dress their wounds. But fear stalked the village now, and as I walked from place to place I could feel its dark presence lurking around every corner. Talk of the war and the horrors it was bringing was on everyone’s lips.
The school remained closed, its smashed doors and broken windows staring out like dark and empty eye sockets. What was the point in it reopening? Parents were fearful of their children returning—for what was to stop the same horrors happening all over again? It was government soldiers who had surrounded the school as the Janjaweed had done their work. This horror was the government’s doing; it had been sanctioned by the rulers in Khartoum.
What had the inhabitants of Mazkhabad village done to deserve such treatment? What had they possibly done? What had the schoolgirls done to deserve such treatment from their own government? As the village talked in fearful whispers, no one could understand what had happened. What was it designed to achieve? It was pur
e madness, senseless evil. What in God’s name had the village done to deserve such things?
And what could any child ever have done to deserve to be treated in this way?
CHAPTER TWENTY
They Come for Me
Barely a week after the attack on the village school they came for me. Around midday I heard a car pull up outside the clinic. For a moment I hoped it might be the UN men returning with the promised medical supplies. But instead three men dressed in scruffy khaki uniforms strode into the clinic. With barely a break in their stride they hauled me to my feet by the scruff of my white medical tunic, knocking over my desk things as they did so.
“Move!” a soldier ordered. “Move! You’re coming with us!”
For a moment I tried to resist. “What d’you want? What d’you want? Get your hands off me!”
A face was thrust into mine, hatred burning in bloodshot eyes, a savage mouth flecked with spittle: “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!”
As they dragged me out of the clinic, my eyes momentarily met those of Sayed. For a second he looked as if he might say something, and then his fearful gaze was cast down to the floor. They marched me across to the waiting jeep and threw me into the rear. One got in on either side of me and the doors were slammed shut. The third soldier got into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine.
There was a dark, terrifying silence in that vehicle as we drove away from the clinic. No one spoke a word. I didn’t even try to ask where they were taking me. I knew that this time, it was deadly serious. My heart was pounding, pain drilling like a jackhammer inside my skull. I knew they were going to kill me. A voice kept yelling inside my head: Today they’re going to kill you; they’re going to kill you; they’re going to kill you today.
I didn’t know exactly why they were going to kill me. Was it my help for the injured fighters? My help for the rape victims? Who else had I helped that might mean that I had to die? Or was it my failure to keep the list of names? In a way I was past caring. Sooner or later, we all of us knew that the darkness was going to come down. Everyone in Mazkhabad knew in their hearts that the horror was coming.
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