KHARTOUM, December 16, 2008 – Strong evidence has emerged of children and adults being used as slaves in Sudan’s Darfur region, a study published by the Darfur Consortium Wednesday reports.
Eyewitnesses say the Sudanese army has been involved in abducting women and children to be sex slaves and domestic staff for troops in Khartoum.
Up to 300.000 people have died since conflict began in Darfur in 2003. At least 2,7 million people have fled their homes.
Thousands of people from non-Arabic speaking ethnic groups in Darfur have been targeted, its report says.
Victims have been rounded up during joint attacks on villages by the Arabic-speaking Janjaweed and the Sudanese Armed Forces, according to the study.
Civilians are also tortured and killed while their villages are razed to ethnically cleanse areas, which are then repopulated with Arabic-speaking people, including nomads from Chad, Niger, Mali and Cameroon, it says.
Most of the abductees are women and girls, but there is new evidence in Darfur of kidnappers targeting men and boys for forced agricultural labour, says the report.
The abducted women and girls, meanwhile, are raped and forced to marry their captors as well as carry out household chores and sometimes cultivate crops, according to the study.
Sudan’s government has always denied the existence of slavery in the country, although Khartoum has previously admitted abductions occurred in the north-south civil war of 1983-2005, when up to 14,000 people were kidnapped.
