Darfur - Assault on Survival: A Call for Security, Justice and Restitution

In Darfur, Sudan, a way of life has been annihilated. Families have fled homesteads that belonged to their families for generations. Hundreds of thousands have been beaten, raped, and killed. The villages they have lived in since they were born, the attributes of their civil society, and the intimate social structures that bound them together have been obliterated.

In May 2004, PHR collected eyewitness testimony from dozens of Darfurian refugees in Chad and found ample evidence of an organized attempt to destroy non-Arab groups. PHR called the actions of the perpetrators genocide, and identified indicators of genocide, including consistent patterns of targeting non-Arabs, destruction of villages, pursuing non-Arabs with intent to make them leave their villages, raping non-Arab women, and forcing everyone out of their villages into hostile terrain.

PHR returned to the Chad/Sudan border in 2005, compiling information about the lives of the affected before the attacks, about the attacks themselves — the scale and scope of destruction, the theft and torching of property and possessions— and about their current existence in the refugee camps.

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