The award ceremony celebrated the courage of Dr. Halima Bashir and remembered Anna Politkovskaya, as well as the first recipient of the award, Natalia Estemirova, the statement added.
Marian Katzarova, a former journalist and researcher for Amnesty International, founded Raw in War in 2006 in order to defend human rights, and particularly those of women in war zones.
Anna Politkovskaya was an investigative journalist for the Russian liberal, opposition magazine Novaya Gazeta.
A fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, she published a number of articles on human rights abuses in Chechnya as well as several books (Putin’s Russia, or A Small Corner of Hell, for example) denouncing the debilitating and corrosive effects of Putin’s rule on both Chechnya and Russia.
She was gunned down four years ago, on October 7, 2006, in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, on Vladimir Putin’s birthday…
Natalia Estemirova, a researcher for the Russian human rights NGO Memorial, also investigated the egregious human rights abuses committed by the regime of Chechen President Vladimir Kadyrov, the Putin protégé put in charge of crushing the Islamic resistance to Russian rule and restoring order in the restive republic..
She was also murdered, on July 15, 2009.
Neither the assassins of Anna Politkovskaya nor Natalia Estemirova have been brought to justice. In today’s Russia, the Russia of MM. Medvedev and Putin, some crimes are never punished, let alone seriously investigated…
Dr. Bashir, who obtained political asylum in the United Kingdom and now lives in London with her husband and children, declined to attend the award ceremony, having received unspecified threats…
Halima Bashir, now 31, hails from southern Sudan.
Her well-off family belongs to the African tribe of the Zaghawa.
Thanks to her father, she received an education.
A gifted pupil, she went to the capital Khartoum to study medicine.
I was the first from my desert village to go to university, and the first in our sub-tribe, the Coube, to qualify as a medical doctor, she later wrote in The Times of London.
After graduation, she returned home, and worked in a local hospital.
Shortly after the Darfur conflict erupted, and its numerous victims demanded urgent medical attention, I worked in the accident and emergency ward, where I treated all people - regardless of race, colour or creed. There was a police unit there, and doctors were supposed to report anyone suspected of being involved in the war, she wrote.
She attended to rebels and government-backed militia members alike, indiscriminately.
Yet, following an interview she had given to the media denouncing the horrors engendered by the conflict, she was arrested by the Sudanese secret police.
Threatened with retribution should she again impart her misgivings to the media, she was banished to a local clinic in a remote area of Sudan.
One day (in 2004) the Janjaweed attacked. They surrounded the girls' school, and, while government troops stood guard, they gang-raped the girls. I had to treat the victims, the youngest of whom was 8 years old. I was sickened and horrified beyond words, she wrote.
At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with 8-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures to go around, she subsequently told Nicholas Kristof, of the NYT.
When United Nations personnel came to investigate, Dr. Bashir described what she had seen. These were innocent people. They did not deserve this, she told beliefnet.
A few days later, government soldiers abducted her…
You know what rape is? one soldier asked her.
The face is a mask of hatred-eyes close to mine, his soldier’s breath stinking… ‘We’ll show you what rape is, you black dog…’
Three of them took turns to rape me, one after the other. They raped me until I lost consciousness. When I came to my senses I was alone, I wished I was dead.
The second day they came for me again. They raped me until I fainted. ‘You know what we have decided to do with you ?We are going to let you live because we know you’d prefer to die’, she wrote in her book Tears of the Desert.
In addition, the soldiers inflicted other wounds, cuts with heir knives and burns with their cigarettes…
She was eventually released.
Now she had much to tell foreigners about rape; she could give them a first hand account, her abusers cruelly suggested…
She returned to her village but could not find safety there either.
The Janjaweed supported by Sudanese army helicopters attacked and bombed the village.
Her father was killed, and the village obliterated.
Halima fled, heading south for Nuba province.
At the cost of what remained of her family’s wealth, including her grandmother’s jewelry, she was smuggled out of the country and eventually reached the UK, in 2005.
She later testified before the International Criminal Court (ICC), against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
And I also know that the war crimes in Darfur, including the use of rape as a weapon of war, have been sanctioned from the very top of the regime in Sudan. My life is testimony to that. Before the war in Darfur, the Arab tribes that make up the Janjaweed were poor nomads, with no weapons but swords and knives. They were armed by the regime, and given orders to lay waste to our homeland. They were aided by the warplanes and soldiers of the Sudanese military, she wrote.
The current conflict began in 2003, when the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebelled against the Sudanese government, accusing the latter of oppressing the black African population of the region
The Sudanese government and armed forces are largely composed of Arab tribes, the Abbala, originating from the northern region of Rizeigat.
The government also supports a militia called the Janjaweed (devil on horseback, in Arabic), with a similar ethnic makeup. All these tribes are mainly nomadic.
The rebels are composed of non-Arab, black yet Muslim, sedentary farmers of the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit ethnic groups.
Ethnic and racial in nature, the conflict also revolves around the use and ownership of land.
In 2007, the ICC indicted Ahmed Haroun, the Sudanese Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed leader, on charges of crimes against humanity.
The following year, the Sudanese President himself, Omar Hassan al-Bashir was charged by the ICC with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
According to the ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Sudanese President masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups, on account of their ethnicity, following the 2003 uprising. His motives were largely political. His alibi was a 'counterinsurgency'. His intent was genocide, he told the BBC.
The Sudanese Army and the Janjaweed attacked the villages of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, killing thousands and forcing thousands of others to flee..
Housed in refugee camps, the survivors have been the targets of further government violence.
In the camps Bashir's forces kill the men and rape the women. I don't have the luxury to look away. I have evidence, Luis Moreno-Ocampo told the BBC.
An international warrant for the arrest of President Bashir has been issued.Some 300,000 men, women and children have been killed because of this conflict, and 2.6 million others compelled to become refugees within their own country.
How many women and girls have government and pro-government forces raped?
No one knows…
Last April, Bashir was reelected President of Sudan with over 68% of the vote.
His two main rivals had withdrawn before the election, convinced the results were preordained.
Regardless of the outcome, Bashir belongs in The Hague responding to the serious charges against him, for which victims have still seen no accountability, Human Rights Watch Africa director Georgette Gagnon told The Guardian.
What has happened to me and to many Darfuri women is something we cannot forget ... The only thing that might let us sometimes forget about it ... is when we see justice, Halima told Reuters before the awards ceremony.
Yet, Mr. Bashir has nothing much to worry about.
He will be able to travel around the globe, regardless of the arrest warrant.
The African Union, the League of Arab States, the Non-Aligned Movement, and predictably, China and Russia all oppose the ICC’s decision, and thus have no intention of enforcing it.
Nevertheless, perhaps one day, somewhere, a leader who has the opportunity to do so, will listen to his better nature, seize the criminal, and send him to The Hague (home of the ICC).
He will be in good company.
(the photograph of Halima Bashir was found here)
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