Sudan's forgotten suffering: life at a standstill after fleeing

Aboutengé is primarily a camp for women and children, who make up the majority of the 47,000 camp residents. Chad in Central Africa, itself a desperately poor country, has taken in around 920,000 refugees from its eastern neighbor Sudan. According to UN figures, there are a total of almost 11.6 million people displaced by the war in Sudan, which has now been going on for three years, and 4.5 million people have sought refuge abroad.

The United Nations speaks of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. At the same time, the war and its victims are overshadowed by the Middle East war and receive much less attention. An end to the bloody conflict between de facto head of state Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, between the government army SAF and Daglo's militia RSF, is not in sight.

No mercy even for babies

Yeman Mohamat Ramadan recounts the days of flight, when the RSF fighters attacked places in West Darfur and carried out massacres against the people of the Massalit ethnic group. "They didn't let the men and older boys go, but beat and killed them," she says. The women and girls who fled the burning and destroyed city were abused and robbed. "Girls were raped in front of their families. There were pregnant women who went into labor because of the stress. Then the Janjaweed waited until the baby was born. If it was a boy, they killed him."

Ramadan and the other women are referring to the RSF when they talk about the Janjaweed - Arab cavalry militias that killed, abused and expelled members of the non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur during the genocide more than 20 years ago. Sexual violence was already a weapon of war back then.

Children only drew fire and guns

Many people in Aboutengé have experienced terrible things. The children's rights organization Plan International runs two shelters for children here. "When we started working here, they drew flames and guns," says emergency aid coordinator Kefa Mayange. Sometimes they told us about burning cities, about men, about weapons. That they had seen people being thrown into the fire. "Today they paint flowers," says Mayange.

In the beginning, there were constant fights, says a caregiver. The boys, who had seen so much violence, had to learn to resolve confrontations without violence.

Added to this is the lack of prospects. At the age of 13 or 14, many boys are already considering whether they should try the dangerous route to Libya and across the sea. "I want to go to Brazil to support my family," says one youngster.

"After three months, I told my mother what had happened"

Helping her family - that's what 17-year-old Wahiba, who is cradling her four-month-old baby in her arms, also wanted to do. Her father was killed in the war and her older brother was injured. Wahiba therefore looked for work making bricks outside the camp. But then came the day when two masked men ambushed her and took her into an empty building.

They raped her for hours, as Wahiba recounts. The next day, the perpetrators abandoned her on the street. Like many young women from a conservative society, Wahiba had not been educated. When her period stopped, she didn't know how to interpret the signs of pregnancy. "After three months, I told my mother what had happened," she says.

Wahiba's mother stands firmly by her daughter's side, but sexual violence is strongly associated with stigma in Sudan. "My uncle said I was no longer part of the family. My cousins threw my clothes outside the hut," says Wahiba in a low voice.

A group of women in Aboutengé have joined forces to break through the wall of silence and make it clear that it is not the survivors of sexual violence who need to feel ashamed. Ramadan is one of them.

Between hope and fear at the border crossing

Change of scene: New arrivals from Sudan sit under trees on straw mats at the Red Cross site at the Adré border crossing, their few belongings scattered around them. Many are marked by the hardships of the journey and their experiences.

A haggard-looking woman reaches into the small plastic bag on her lap and pulls out a small metal bowl for water or food. "This is all they left us," she says bitterly. She comes from Al-Fashir, behind her lies an odyssey of hunger, scenes of violence and streets full of corpses.

An old man, who has been on the run again and again in recent years, lists the stops: "Samsam, Al-Fashir, Tawila." These are names that stand for some of the worst places of the war. "There is no better place to be than in your own country," he says. "But I have no choice. The war leaves me none."