In recent years Americans have heard a great deal about the “invisible wounds” some people carry with them after a traumatic experience. Whether it’s a story about a returning veteran of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or that of a Katrina survivor, public awareness of invisible wounds has increased considerably over the past few years.
As someone who has dealt with the invisible wounds of war, both personally and with comrades, I cannot even begin to imagine the difficulties faced by untreated victims of the genocide in Darfur and Sudan.
In today’s Washington Post, Michael Gerson pens an article that tells some of these very troubling tales:
On May 15, a woman near the Al Hamadiya camp in Zalingei was collecting firewood. Three armed men in khaki uniforms raped her, stabbed her in the leg, inflicted genital injuries and left her bleeding. She spent 45 days in the hospital. In 2003, the same woman was raped and shot while fleeing her village.
Her story is in a recent, exhaustive, chilling report on Sudan written by a panel of experts at the United Nations. A U.N. official told me, “We have not talked to a single woman [in Darfur] who has not stated that sexual violence is their first concern.” The panel documented sexual assaults against pregnant women and 12-year-old girls. Prosecutions are nonexistent. Local officials are indifferent.
The crisis in Darfur is anything but over. If anything, aid from the world is needed now more than ever.
We must not allow war criminal Omar al-Bashir and his deadly regime to outlast our resolve. We must not allow our care to fade; our spirit to be broken; or our commitment to be anything but stalwart. We must, in chorus-as fellow humans, demand from our leaders a new day in Sudan.
We have to demand that our leaders deal with the invisible wounds.
