Sexual violence on 'staggering' scale in Sudan civil war: UN probe

Rape is widespread in Sudan's civil war, a United Nations investigation said Tuesday, accusing paramilitaries especially of committing sexual violence on a "staggering" scale.

Children are not spared the abuse, with women and girls being abducted for sexual slavery, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan said in a new report.

"There is no safe place in Sudan now," the investigation's chair Mohamed Chande Othman said.

War has raged since April 2023 between the Sudanese army (SAF) under the country's de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

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It has triggered one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. More than 25 million people -- over half the population -- are facing acute hunger.

War crimes

The SAF, the RSF, and their allied militias "have committed large-scale human rights and international humanitarian law violations, many of which may amount to war crimes and/or crimes against humanity", the mission concluded.

Both sides have engaged in torture amounting to war crimes and obstructed access to humanitarian aid, the mission said.

The report accused both sides of sexual violence but said the RSF was behind the "large majority" of documented cases.

The mission said the RSF was responsible for "sexual violence on a large scale", including "gang-rapes and abducting and detaining victims in conditions that amount to sexual slavery".

It also said the RSF and its allies had indulged in "abduction, and recruitment and use of children in hostilities", amid systematic looting and pillaging.

- Rape, terror and punishment -

"The sheer scale of sexual violence we have documented in Sudan is staggering," said Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania.

Such abuses were "part of a pattern aimed at terrorising and punishing civilians for perceived links with opponents," and suppressing any opposition to their military advances, the mission said.

In the western Darfur region, sexual violence was committed "with particular cruelty, with firearms, knives and whips".

The report said: "First-hand sources informed of rape of girls as young as eight years and women as old as 75."

Victims were often subjected to "punching, beatings with sticks and lashing, before and during the rape", with sexual violence often occurring in the presence of the victims' relatives.

The mission said they had received credible information "about rape and gang-rape of men and boys".

UN rights chief Volker Turk said Tuesday that escalating hostilities in Sudan's eastern al-Jazira state were further exacerbating the risk of atrocities.

Turk's office said it had documented at least 25 cases of sexual violence in RSF attacks on Sharq Al-Jazira villages, including an 11-year-old girl who died as a result, while women and girls were abducted.

His spokesman Seif Magango told reporters that those responsible should be brought to justice "to break this horrendous cycle of violence".

14 million displaced

UN migration agency chief Amy Pope said the situation in Sudan was "catastrophic" and deserved greater attention.

"Sudan is easily the most neglected crisis in the world today," she told a Geneva press briefing, speaking from Port Sudan.

"All wars are brutal, but the toll of this one is particularly horrifying... A generation will live in the shadow of trauma."

Her agency's latest figures released Tuesday show that there are more than 11 million internally displaced people within Sudan -- 8.3 million of whom fled their homes since the conflict erupted.

Some 3.1 million more people have fled the country since April last year.

"More than half of those displaced are women, and more than a quarter of them are children under the age of five," said Pope.

More than 200,000 people have fled their homes since September, she added.

Despite the scale of displacement, the UN migration agency's appeal for $168 million has only gotten a fifth of those funds.

"With the proper amount of funding, there is much we can do to alleviate the suffering," said Pope.