UNIVERSAL THREAT The world turns a blind eye to rape in Sudan BY MARY ANN SORRENTINO

Kalma, Khor Abeche, Darfur, and Khartoum are some of the lovely Sudanese city names behind which hides the ugly, brutal and degrading crime of rape. These cities hide more than 500 stories of rape in a four-month period, according to a report filed in March by Doctors Without Borders, the international aid organization.

The Sudanese government, in addition to denying this report, charged the senior aid workers responsible with spying, undermining state security, and filing false reports. (The charges were eventually dropped.)

Time reporter Sam Dealey, writing from Khor Abeche, described this scene:

"Kicked and beaten, their hands bound behind their backs, the women lay side by side on the dusty earth beneath Sudan’s scorching sun. Nine in all, they were spoils of war, taken last April from their village of Khor Abeche in a dawn raid by the Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed . . . The victims were told they were the rebels’ whores and daughters . . . The women lay there denied food and water, some sobbing and others asleep from exhaustion . . . ."

Rape is not a sexual crime as much as a crime of control and violence.

Yet women and the men who love them have to wonder what it is that brings men — whole battalions of men — to a point where fighting a war does not suffice. Having successfully attacked the enemy and taken control of the camp, they must celebrate their victory by raping all the women — of all ages. The very young have their virginity brutally decimated in the course of a gang rape. There’s the torturous violation of the aged, by gangs of men whose attack on such women, old enough to be their grandmothers, brings bile to the back of the throat.

More than 50,000 people have been killed, and millions displaced, in Sudan’s genocide. We do not know how many women have been sexually assaulted, debased, degraded, and killed.

This is not a new story. World War II saw the Japanese making sex slaves of hundreds of Japanese and Korean women. Vietnam vets tell stories of the rapes that occurred in villages there, by our own soldiers as well as by the Vietcong. As long as there have been wars, "rape and plunder" have been a part of the story. Even worse, the world turns a blind eye.

My granddaughter, my daughter, and I remain at risk, wherever we may live.

I mention these things to remind us how far we have not come.