Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, moved to tears by Darfur war victims
Photo credit: Sophie met survivors of the war in Sudan in a transit camp in Chad. STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Duchess of Edinburgh was moved to tears on hearing first-hand reports of a genocide unfolding in Sudan during a day spent with mothers and children on its border with Chad.
Sophie, 59, appeared overwhelmed by the women’s accounts of surrendering to rape to stay alive or get food for their families, seeing their daughters face the same fate and other children being killed.
“But what they do to the children is … I can’t even use the words,” the duchess said after a private meeting with survivors, referencing the militia using rape to terrorise Sudan’s western Darfur region. Her eyes still red and brimming from the encounter at a tented clinic that she described as “devastating”, Sophie added: “These women have no option but to leave.”
The Times accompanied Sophie on a three-day visit to Chad over the weekend — the first by a member of the royal family — which included Adré, the main crossing from Darfur where hundreds of Sudanese are arriving daily after running the gauntlet of the Rapid Support Forces.
As the duchess stood at the parched river bed which marks the international border — with fighting only 12 miles away in Darfur on the other side — a family on a pony cart trundled in to find refuge.
The duchess, with the help of interpreters, spoke to Hadidah Abdullah, cradling her nine-month-old baby, Bayena, who said they had travelled for 40 miles in search of food and shelter.
Those who make it to Adré will join 230,000 refugees now crammed into a transit camp of stick huts and plastic sprawling into the desert. They describe scenes reminiscent of the genocidal slaughter of 300,000 black Africans two decades ago by Arab militias in Darfur mounted on horseback and camels, and in trucks.
A famine was declared in Darfur in August that some experts have warned could eclipse the catastrophe in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s in which a million people starved to death. This time round, the hunger and ethnic cleansing has not caught the attention of the Western powers and celebrities who were then so vocal.
The crisis being described to her, Sophie said, was “akin to Rwanda” — the 1994 genocide in which at least 800,000 people were killed — and yet had “ fallen from everybody’s consciousness ”
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The Duchess of Edinburgh was moved to tears on hearing first-hand reports of a genocide unfolding in Sudan during a day spent with mothers and children on its border with Chad.
Sophie, 59, appeared overwhelmed by the women’s accounts of surrendering to rape to stay alive or get food for their families, seeing their daughters face the same fate and other children being killed.
“But what they do to the children is … I can’t even use the words,” the duchess said after a private meeting with survivors, referencing the militia using rape to terrorise Sudan’s western Darfur region. Her eyes still red and brimming from the encounter at a tented clinic that she described as “devastating”, Sophie added: “These women have no option but to leave.”
The crisis being described to her, Sophie said, was “akin to Rwanda” — the 1994 genocide in which at least 800,000 people were killed — and yet had “ fallen from everybody’s consciousness ”
Those who make it to Adré will join 230,000 refugees now crammed into a transit camp of stick huts and plastic sprawling into the desert. They describe scenes reminiscent of the genocidal slaughter of 300,000 black Africans two decades ago by Arab militias in Darfur mounted on horseback and camels, and in trucks.
This time round, the hunger and ethnic cleansing has not caught the attention of the Western powers and celebrities who were then so vocal.
Where are our student protests? They must have forgotten that Black Lives Matter.
Not exactly. Let me explain:
Some Black lives do matter-- very much so.
But others don't!
(They only matter when they fit the students other political agendas, whatever they may be).
If she thinks that's bad...
Personally, I think the whole world may end up just like that, the way we're going.