The Speech of Dr. Halima Bashir

2009 Peace Award Address
Dr. Halima Bashir

Firstly, I’d like to thank all those involved in giving me this Award, and for the invitation to America to receive it. I’d like to thank those who proposed and voted for me, and those of you who helped organize today’s ceremony.

For me, for a young woman from a very isolated part of the world like Darfur, to have come here today to receive an award of such importance is a great journey. I am humbled and honored and so very grateful for this recognition, and for the attention it may draw to the ongoing conflict in Darfur.

There are many crises in the world today: wars, starvation, natural disasters like tsunamis and flooding. But my own life is testimony to the one conflict that is causing more death and suffering than any other today, but which seems to go so unnoticed and unreported – Darfur.

After the Rwanda genocide the world pledged that ‘never again’ would it stand by as innocents were killed in the hundreds of thousands. Sadly, for too long the world did just that in Darfur. No one knows how many have been killed – but the numbers run into the hundreds of thousands victims. Men, women and children. Unarmed. Innocent. Defenseless.

Each death is an individual – each of those people a human being with hopes and fears and dreams just like my own. And some four million people have been driven from our homeland, Darfur, and are forced to live in refugee camps, which are places of a hopeless frustration and despair. Even there, even today, some six years after the genocide by attrition began, they are still not safe or secure. Those camps are attacked; women are raped; children are kidnapped – and so the world community still cannot exert itself to protect the people of Darfur.

The world pledged never again, but in Darfur that pledge has proved hollow.

Today, there is a peacekeeping force on the ground in Darfur. However, the UNAMID force is woefully undermanned and under-equipped, and ill-prepared to defend the huge numbers of vulnerable civilians that it is tasked to protect. Peacekeepers have been killed by Sudan government forces, their allied militias like the murderous Janjaweed, and by lawless rebel groups. The UMANID force is trying to do a job for which it is hopelessly ill-suited, with a woeful lack of support from developed nations.

In short, for the millions of refugees the prospect of going home – because, remember, for all of us Darfur is our home – is a distant dream. Our land is there. Our burned out villages are there, awaiting us to return and rebuild them. Our orchards are there, our forests for gathering firewood, and the graveyards of our ancestors – yet there is no security to allow us to go home. Every single one of those people in the refugee camps just wants to go home to live in peace and security and with dignity, and to rebuild their lives.

We know that the world turned its face away when it could have made that phrase ‘never again’ really mean something for the people of Darfur. We are angry and feel let down, but we have accepted that failure. But now we ask that we be given the peace and security simply to allow us to return to our homes. If the world could not guarantee ‘never again’ in Darfur, will it not find the resources and capacity and the collective will to guarantee four million Darfuris the right to go home?

We are patient people, but we know that time is running out. As our people languish in refugee camps, we know that the Khartoum regime is resettling its allies – the tribes that made us the murderous Janjaweed militias; the devil horsemen – on our most fertile land and in our most well-watered villages. The longer this continues, the less chance we have of ever returning home – for our land will be occupied by those who killed out fathers and raped our children before our very eyes.

The world failed to guarantee ‘never again’, but can it not at least guarantee us a homeland to return to?

I saw the waves of devil horsemen riding into my village. I heard their cries as they taunted us, calling us ‘black dogs and slaves’. I heard them scream out that they would kill us, kill us all. I fled, but my father stayed to fight, and he was killed, as were so many of the brave men in my village. They faced Kalashnikov assault rifles and the Khartoum regime’s helicopter gunships with little more than daggers and spears, and the odd, ancient hunting rifle. They stayed to buy us women and children the time to escape, so that we might live another day.

Yet still we languish in the refugee camps and cannot return to our homes.

As a trained medical doctor, I treated the victims of the child rapes. Imaging it. Imagine a country where grown men and leaders draw up a policy of child rape as a weapon of waging war. This is what happened in my country. The world failed to stop the horror, and still the refugee camps are not secure. I’ve seen the pictures the children as young as five years old draw today of the horror, the memories and the trauma burned deep into their minds. I’ve heard their tears and their stories, and their screams at night as they dream the darkest of nightmares. The least those children deserve is to be allowed home – home so their mothers and sisters can rebuild their lives in a loving peaceful family.

And the least every Darfuri deserves is justice. The International Criminal Court has indicted the President of Sudan, and others, for war crimes in Darfur. The move has been criticized by some as inflaming the conflict in Darfur, but there was little that could make it worse for us, for the survivors. And like all victims of an unspeakable horror – a genocide by rape, mass murder and starvation – we crave justice and a reckoning. We dream of the day that the masterminds of the horror face punishment for their crimes. For us, for we Darfuri victims, there can be no real homecoming, or closure, without such justice being done.

Imagine if a force of gunmen rode into your village, and gunned down the inhabitants simply because their skin color was different from your own. Imagine if they killed your father and raped your children, and left your home a scorched and burning ruin. And imagine if their hatred and their blind prejudice forced you to flee from your own land – the land where you family and your ancestors had lived for centuries. Imagine then how you would feel. That is how I feel. It is how every Darfuri woman and child feels. It is the feeling of the entire people of Darfur.

The world failed to deliver on ‘never again’. All we now ask for is the right to go home, in peace and freedom, and for justice to be done.

Is it too much to ask? I hope not. Every day I pray and I dream that we are given these two things.

I’m so grateful for this award, and to be given the chance and the platform to speak. I’m just a voice for the millions of others; I’m speaking because they cannot speak, locked away in the refugee camps as they are.

Last year I wrote a book telling my life story, called Tears of the Desert. When the British journalist approached me and suggested I speak out, I wondered who might be interested? My story was like the hundreds of thousands of other Darfuri women who had suffered unspeakable war crimes. Who would be interested? What difference would one voice, one story, one cry in the darkness make? Yet the reaction to me telling my story in that book proved to me what an enormous difference one voice can make.

I hope today my one voice, my one cry, my one small story can make a difference for all the people of Darfur.

Thank you.